AI Tooling Engineer

AI Tooling Engineer LocationSan Francisco, CA; Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; Seattle, WAEmployment TypeFull timeDepartmentEngineeringCompensation$200K – $260K • Offers EquityThe salary or hourly rate range may be inclusive of several levels that would be applicable to the position. Final salary or hourly rate will be based on a number of factors including, level, relevant prior experience, skills, and expertise. This range is only inclusive of base salary or hourly rate, not benefits or equity.🚀 Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot!Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. Whether it's trading cards, fashion, electronics, or live plants, our sellers are building real businesses across hundreds of categories. We're building live commerce at a scale that's never been done in the West, and there's no playbook to copy. The people here are shaping how an entirely new industry develops.As a remote co-located team, we're inspired by our values and anchored in hubs across the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany, and Australia. We move fast, stay close to our users, and focus on the work that drives the most impact.We're one of the fastest growing marketplaces and were recently named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America by Forbes. 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.💻The RoleWe're looking for an AI Engineer to build the internal tools, prototypes, and business workflows that put AI into the hands of every team at Whatnot. You'll own ambiguous, cross-org bets end-to-end: finding real problems, shipping working software fast, hardening what works, and scaling how Whatnot gets value out of AI. You’ll partner with Whatnot’s AI Platform and Developer Tools teams to leverage their systems, add new functionality, and find ways to accelerate adoption by non-technical team members.This is a high-velocity, high-judgment builder role. You've shipped a lot of apps and prototypes—you're someone who can sit with a CX lead or an ops manager, understand their workflow in an afternoon, and have a working prototype in their hands by the end of the week. You create leverage for yourself by building on top of 3rd party tools where it’s advantageous but also know how to navigate lower-level interfaces where necessary. You also operate above any single project: you help decide where the opportunities are, define the reusable patterns and infrastructure others adopt, and raise the bar for how the whole company builds with AI. You move fluidly across the stack (frontend, backend, data, and the AI layer) and are deeply fluent in the current generation of AI tools and the production patterns around them—prompt engineering, RAG, MCP, agents, and evals.This is not a model-training or research role. You won't be training models—you'll be building the tools, workflows, and integrations that make off-the-shelf AI dependable and useful inside Whatnot's systems and processes.✅ What You'll DoOwn ambiguous, cross-org AI bets end-to-end—identify the highest-leverage problems across the company, decide what to build, and drive it from prototype to durable production toolBuild and ship a high volume of internal apps, prototypes, and automations—going from a vague problem to a working tool in days, then iterating with users toward production qualityDefine the reusable patterns the org builds on, including reference architectures, internal libraries, MCPs, and skills/plugins that let others move faster and saferEmbed directly with teams across CX, Trust & Safety, Ops, and GTM to find high-leverage problems, then build the solution alongside themIntegrate AI tools with internal systems and data sources via APIs, connectors, and event-driven workflows so automations act on real state, not toy inputsScale the leverage—package successful builds...