Litigation, Trust & Risk Counsel

Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot!

Whatnot is a live shopping platform that connects buyers and sellers across categories such as trading cards, fashion, electronics, and live plants. The company is building live commerce at an unprecedented scale for the West, shaping how a 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.

Role

The Legal team protects the platform, enables the business to move fast, and keeps Whatnot ahead of the legal risk that comes with hypergrowth. We're looking for a litigation attorney who understands how platform enforcement decisions and consumer complaints become legal disputes. As our Litigation and Trust & Risk Counsel, you'll manage active disputes matters across our growing docket while serving as the embedded legal advisor to our Trust & Risk and Customer Support teams. You'll report to our Head of Litigation and sit at the operational heart of our legal function — translating Whatnot's real-time enforcement actions into defensible legal positions and keeping our disputes docket moving.

There's no playbook for what we're doing — you'll be creating the processes and infrastructure as we go. That means real ownership early, but it also means you need to be comfortable operating with ambiguity and creating structure where none exists yet.

This role has real room to grow as our disputes and legal operations functions mature.

Litigation

• Manage a docket of active litigation and arbitration matters involving Whatnot sellers and buyers end-to-end: driving litigation and resolution strategy, coordinating with outside counsel, reviewing briefs and submissions, and keeping matters moving under the supervision of our Head of Litigation.

• Analyze demand letters and state AG complaints and draft clear, consistent, and confident responses, leveraging technology to improve efficiency and response time.

• Own IP/DMCA takedown workflow, including scaling process as Whatnot grows, and working closely with our Trust & Risk teams to implement related enforcement actions.

• Manage the legal hold process, including identifying matters, drafting legal holds, managing tracking, and coordinating with internal stakeholders on execution.

• Work with our Trust & Risk Lead to translate investigation outputs into legal positions and arguments and further hone our investigation process.

• Use AI tools (such as Claude CoWork, Glean, GC AI) to drive efficiency, build templates and workflows, and create a safety net so matters don’t get missed.

• Identify systemic issues in the docket and identify business-oriented solutions — you read patterns, not just individual matters, and you bring solutions not just observations.

• Build the playbooks, escalation frameworks, and response templates that don't exist yet — you're energized by creating structure, not just working within it.

Trust & Risk Counseling

• Serve as the real-time legal advisor and partner to our Trust & Risk and Customer Support teams on account enforcement decisions with legal exposure, including seller bans, payout holds, offboarding actions, and account restrictions.

• Partner with our Trust & Risk, Customer Support, and Communications teams to proactively update user communications to improve customer experience and minimize legal risk.

• Develop complete and accurate documentation of enforcement decisions, closing the gap between operational actions and defensible legal positions.

• Assess ongoing areas of risk surfacing through Trust & Risk and Customer Support and work collaboratively with those teams to implement process improvements that reduce downstream legal exposure.

• Support engagement with regulators and legislators on safety issues

• Investigate fraud concerns on the Whatnot platform and communicate legal demands as needed

We offer flexibility to work from home or from one of our global office hubs, and we value in-person time for planning, problem-solving, and connection. Team members in this role must live within commuting distance of our Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, or Seattle hubs.

You

People who do well at Whatnot tend to be comfortable figuring things out as they go, biased toward action, and genuinely curious about what they're building. They care more about outcomes than credit and stay close to the product and the people using it.

As our next Litigation and Trust & Safety Counsel, you should have 5+ years of legal experience plus:

• A J.D. degree, and active bar membership in at least one US state.

• 5+ years of litigation experience , with prior in-house experience owning a high-volume docket strongly preferred. Ideally you have spent time in-house at a tech platform, marketplace, or consumer-facing company, though complex commercial or product liability litigation experience at a large law firm is also a plus.

• Fluency in trust, safety, and risk operations . You have first-hand experience with platform enforcement actions and understand how these decisions are made and how they create legal exposure downstream. New situations surface every day that no policy fully anticipates — good judgment in the grey matters more than waiting for the perfect rule.

• Consumer dispute expertise. You have handled high-volume consumer-facing disputes and understand balancing customer experience with keeping the platform trustworthy. Platform liability knowledge (Section 230) and IP/DMCA experience a plus.

• Strong oral and written communication skills. You understand that all external communication reflects the company and have high standards for your own work product and a keen attention to detail. You have the ability to tailor tone and content to the audience at hand – whether that is a junior Whatnot employee, senior executive partner, external regulator, or federal court.

• Real intellectual curiosity. You ask why a pattern is emerging in the docket before anyone asks you to, and you're energized by novel legal questions — not slowed down by them.

• Sharp judgment about what to elevate and what to handle — you don't over-lawyer routine matters, you don't under-escalate real risks, and you can tell the difference at speed.

• Demonstrated AI tool fluency. You have used AI tools (e.g., GC AI, Claude CoWork, or Glean) to do real legal work and are excited to have the opportunity to leverage these tools to improve the efficiency, consistency, and quality of our work.

• Genuine interest in Whatnot. You’ve used the app (or are excited to), and you get what it means to support a two-sided marketplace community.

Nice to Have

• Two-sided marketplace experience. Experience in a two-sided or multi-sided marketplace, balancing buyer and seller interests

• Fraud and trust & safety investigation background. You have investigated fraud or platform abuse concerns (e.g., payments fraud, account takeover, marketplace abuse) and know how to turn investigative findings into legal action.

• International consumer protection knowledge. You're familiar with consumer protection frameworks outside the US (UK, EU, Australia), which will matter as Whatnot's disputes docket grows across its global hubs.

Benefits

• Generous Holiday and Time off Policy

• 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.

EOE

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.