Machine Learning Scientist

Whatnot is the largest livestream 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, Ireland, Poland, and Germany, we’re building the future of online marketplaces—together.

From fashion, beauty, and electronics to rare 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.

We are looking for intellectually curious, entrepreneurial individuals to become foundational members of our Core Machine Learning team. Bringing to bear a mixture of model development and software engineering skills, you will design, develop, and deploy models and scaled solutions to solve 0 to 1 problems across a wide variety of product surfaces. The Core Machine Learning team architects design patterns while actively contributing to initiatives spanning search, recommendation, growth, trust and safety, and fraud, to name a few. The ideal candidate is excited by the prospect of end to end execution of projects and is willing and able to wear multiple hats–no two days are exactly the same at a fast growing startup!

• Develop and deploy new production machine learning algorithms and systems that enrich the buyer and seller experience.
• Build and help set direction across the entire machine learning development process to implement production algorithms, including exploratory data analysis, data modeling, feature engineering, model training, testing, deployment, and monitoring.
• Contribute across the data science and machine learning development stack: ideation, opportunity sizing, prototyping, load testing, deployment, and monitoring.
• Drive initiatives across multiple product areas and communicate findings with leadership and product teams using dashboards, notebooks, and/or documents where appropriate.
• Design and implement end-to-end data pipelines and systems that support MLOps and critical business processes.
• Deep dive into mission-critical problems unique to Whatnot’s livestream auction ecosystem and design bespoke algorithmic solutions.

Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that embodying a low ego, growth mindset, and high-impact drive goes a long way here.

As our next Machine Learning Scientist you should have 4+ years of professional experience developing machine learning systems and algorithms, plus:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Economics, a related technical field, or equivalent work experience.
• 1+ years of software or machine learning engineering experience building for consumer-scale loads.
• Industry experience with a track record of applying the scientific methods to solve real-world problems on consumer scale data.
• Experience leading work to develop and deploy machine learning- and data-based solutions in production.
• Extensive experience with Python and SQL for data science, machine learning, and software development e.g. PyTorch, LightGBM, FastAPI
• Ability to work autonomously and lead initiatives across multiple product areas and communicate findings with leadership and product teams.
• Comfortability with data warehouses and transformation tools such as Snowflake, dbt, Dagster.
• Proficiency and experience in applied statistics and machine learning fields e.g. Experimentation and Causal Analysis, Recommendations, Fraud & Anomaly Detection, Natural Language Processing.
• Professionalism around collaborating in a remote working environment and well tested reproducible work.
• Above average documentation and communication skills.

For Full-Time (Salary) US-based applicants: $180,000 - $270,000/year + benefits + equity

The salary range may be inclusive of several levels that would be applicable to the position. Final salary will be based on a number of factors including, level, relevant prior experience, skills, and expertise. This range is only inclusive of base salary, not benefits (more details below) or equity.

• Flexible Time off Policy and Company-wide Holidays (including a spring and winter break)
• Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision
• Work From Home Support
• Home office setup allowance
• Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet
• Care benefits
• Monthly allowance for wellness
• Annual allowance towards Childcare
• Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses
• Retirement; 401k offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and Pension plans internationally
• Monthly allowance to dogfood the app
  • All Whatnauts are expected to develop a deep understanding of our product. We're passionate about building the best user experience, and all employees are expected to use Whatnot as both a buyer and a seller as part of their job (our dogfooding budget makes this fun and easy!).
• Parental Leave
• 16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work *company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements which take precedence.

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.