Category Lead

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.

About the Categories & Expansion Team

The Categories & Expansion team owns Whatnot's portfolio of categories and the growth of the sellers and buyers in each community. 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 on this team decide how an entirely new industry develops, category by category.

Role

You own the strategy, growth, and P&L for one of Whatnot's largest or highest growth categories. You set the strategic vision, decide where to invest, and pull the levers across Account Management, Sales, Marketing, Partnerships, and Product to hit it. This is one of the most pivotal seats on the CatEx team: you bring together everything across the org that lets a community thrive on the platform.

• Define the strategy. Map the market, dig into the data, and talk to sellers and buyers to build a clear point of view on how to scale your category sustainably. Turn that into an action plan against the category's biggest opportunities and headwinds, and bring the right cross-functional partners along to execute it.

• Lead the execution. Manage a team of direct and dotted-line reports across Account Management, Sales, Marketing, and Partnerships to onboard and grow sellers, activate influencers, and run community events. Source and close the highest-priority partnerships in the category. Own the metrics that define success (GMV, buyer/seller retention, etc.) and use them to prioritize key focus areas across your team.

• Drive outsized growth. Identify the category unlocks and work cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Operations to ship the solutions that step-change growth. Propose and run tests with leadership to learn fast, and take on the biggest opportunities/risks as an IC.

• Be the voice of your category. Build relationships with your top sellers and buyers, understand their perspectives, and ensure the product meets their needs. Carry our culture by coaching your team to deeply understand the business and product so they can pitch sellers and grow the community. Partner with other Category Leads to keep leveling up how the whole CatEx team executes.

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.

  • A passion for our mission: you live and breathe the needs of our communities and work relentlessly to improve their experience on Whatnot

  • 7+ years of experience working in a fast-paced, client-facing role in high-output environments, such as: Strategy Consulting, Private Equity, or partnerships at a fast-paced tech company

  • A player/coach who gets in the weeds: scrappy, comfortable in a highly ambiguous environment, and no job is too small

  • A proven leader who has managed and developed a team

  • Deeply analytical and comfortable manipulating data to find and act on business insight

  • Strong communicator who can frame and explain insight for a variety of audiences

  • Fluency with AI tools to sharpen problem-solving, analysis, and execution across a wide range of business challenges

  Nice to Have

  • Experience working on a marketplace or a two-sided platform

  • Experience or passion for buying and selling in online marketplace communities

  • Proficiency with SQL & dashboards

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.