Role Description The Buyer Growth team is responsible for driving Whatnot’s top-of-funnel growth and first-time buyer success. We're looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to accelerate buyer growth at Whatnot through intelligent, data-driven experiences. As the first ML engineer, you’ll build and own ML models personalization in onboarding and user targeting in our acquisition and engagement channels. This is a high-impact role on a team directly responsible for growing Whatnot’s buyer base and improving first-time user conversion. - Lead the design, development, and productionization of ML models that power user acquisition, activation, and retention (e.g., ranking models, targeting systems, uplift modeling). - Own the full model lifecycle: from data collection and feature engineering to model training, evaluation, deployment, and online experimentation. - Identify and prioritize high-impact opportunities where machine learning can unlock growth, collaborating with product, engineering, data, and marketing stakeholders. - Drive technical excellence and establish ML best practices across the Buyer Growth team. Qualifications - 5+ years of industry experience building and deploying ML systems at scale. - Demonstrated success in leading end-to-end ML projects that drove measurable business outcomes. - Deep expertise in personalization, ranking, or user modeling; strong intuition around user behavior in consumer products. - Advanced proficiency in Python, SQL, and common ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, XGBoost). - Strong communication and leadership skills; ability to influence roadmap and align cross-functional teams. Requirements - Experience building ML applications in E-commerce or Social products. - Prior experience in growth domains: user segmentation, retention modeling, large scale recommendation systems, notification ranking, etc. Benefits - 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. - 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).