Engineering Manager, Reliability Engineering

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. We're re-defining e-commerce by blending community, shopping, and entertainment into a community just for you. As a remote co-located team, we're inspired by innovation and anchored in our values. With hubs in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, and Poland, we're building the future of online marketplaces –together.

From fashion, beauty, and electronics to collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants, our live auctions have something for everyone.

And we're just getting started As one of the fastest growing marketplaces, we're looking for bold, forward-thinking problem solvers across all functional areas. Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our news and engineering blogs and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business, and bring people together through commerce.

As a senior leader in our Infrastructure organization, you will play a critical role in evolving Whatnot's reliability posture and scaling our platform to support continued hypergrowth. You will oversee our Reliability Engineering team, which is responsible for building the tools, components, and processes that enable every engineering team at Whatnot to build and operate reliable software.

The Reliability Engineering team's mandate centers on SLOs, observability, load testing, resilience testing, incident response, and traffic control mechanisms. You will partner closely with engineering teams across the company to define reliability standards, accelerate detection and mitigation of issues, and ensure that Whatnot's systems remain reliable, scalable, and performant as we grow.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and mentor a team of highly skilled software engineers, supporting their technical growth, execution, and long-term career development.

• Develop and execute the strategic roadmap for reliability engineering at Whatnot.

• Build and operationalize best practices that empower product and platform teams to design and run reliable systems, incorporating SLOs, monitoring standards, and incident response patterns into their development workflows.

• Own the architecture and evolution of reliability tooling, including incident response and SLO measurement systems.

• Lead the team in designing and running load testing at scale, ensuring we validate resilience against both sustained and bursty growth scenarios, and providing tooling that enables teams to contribute new load test scenarios.

• Oversee the development of traffic control features, including distributed semaphores, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and foundational reliability libraries used across Whatnot services.

• Drive continuous improvement in incident detection and mitigation, including early warning systems and foundational observability instrumentation.

• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to influence product and architectural decisions that improve overall reliability and customer impact.

• Build a culture of learning and continuous improvement, with an emphasis on blameless incident analysis, proactive reliability investment, and systematic reduction of repeated failure patterns.

• Scale the team through hiring, mentorship, leadership development, and thoughtful organizational design as team responsibilities expand.

Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance of our Kraków hub.

In addition to embodying our cultural principles, great candidates will also have:

• 10+ years of experience in infrastructure or platform engineering leadership roles, including at least 5 years managing engineering teams.

• Experience in product engineering or as a site lead is a plus.

• Proven experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems with strong reliability, observability, and incident response practices.

• Deep technical grounding in one or more of the following reliability engineering domains: SLO design, monitoring/alerting, incident tooling, traffic control mechanisms, load and chaos testing, or platform engineering.

• Experience leading teams that build tools and frameworks used by other engineering teams, especially those that enhance reliability, diagnosability, and operational excellence.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals with a passion for building reliable systems and improving engineering practices across an organization.

• Demonstrated ability to guide teams through complex system challenges, large-scale migrations, and longer term reliability initiatives.

• Exceptional communication and leadership skills, with the ability to influence technical and architectural direction across teams and organizations.

• A passion for enabling teams to build fast while building safely through well-designed proactive detection mechanisms and tooling.

Whatnot is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, parental status, disability status, or any other status protected by local law. We believe that our work is better and our company culture is improved when we encourage, support, and respect the different skills and experiences represented within our workforce.