Product Counsel

🚀 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. 💻 Role We're looking for a Product Counsel generalist to join Whatnot's growing product legal team. You'll be the day-to-day legal partner to product, engineering, and design teams as they build and ship new features for a fast-scaling live commerce marketplace, helping the business move quickly while managing legal risk responsibly.

You'll work most closely with Product, Engineering, Design, and Policy, with support from teams like Comms, Trust & Safety, Marketing, and Business Development. The work is broad by design: consumer protection, marketing and promotions, intellectual property, platform liability, privacy, and emerging regulation will all show up on your desk, often in the same week. We need someone who can quickly spot the issues that matter, prioritize them against business goals, and give clear, actionable guidance.

Beyond the day-to-day, you'll help build the playbooks, templates, and self-serve resources that turn legal from a bottleneck into a force multiplier. The ideal candidate is a product counseling generalist who is curious, moves fast, and knows how to get to yes.

• Support the full product development lifecycle, advising Product, Engineering, Design, and Policy from initial concept through launch and post-launch iteration.

• Identify, assess, and drive resolution of legal issues across consumer protection, advertising and promotions, intellectual property, privacy, data security, intermediary liability, online safety and content moderation, and platform regulation.

• Review and advise on product features, user flows, terms of service, in-app disclosures, and marketing claims, including new category launches and the auction, seller, and live streaming experiences at the core of Whatnot.

• Draft and update terms, disclosures, FAQs, and seller policies, and work with Operations to align processes to them.

• Track evolving laws (such as CCPA/CPRA, COPPA, FTC rules, and state privacy and consumer protection laws) and translate their impact into practical guidance for product and business teams.

• Advise on novel areas such as AI, recommendation systems, and generative content, and partner with Policy, Trust & Safety, and Security on platform integrity and abuse prevention.

• Build playbooks, templates, and training that let teams move quickly while managing risk.

• Work efficiently with outside counsel, ensuring quality and cost-effectiveness.

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 New York City, Seattle, San Francisco, or Los Angeles 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 Product Counsel, you should have 8+ years of legal experience, plus:

• J.D. from an accredited law school and active bar membership (or eligibility to register as in-house counsel) in at least one U.S. state.

• 8+ years of legal experience, including substantial time advising on product and technology matters at a law firm and/or in-house at a technology company, including counseling on consumer-facing digital products.

• Working expertise across a range of product legal areas, such as consumer protection, advertising and marketing law (including contests, sweepstakes, and promotions), U.S. privacy and data protection (including CCPA/CPRA and other state laws), competition, platform and intermediary liability, and intellectual property.

• Proven ability to give practical, business-oriented counsel in a high-velocity environment, giving clear, solutions-focused answers rather than hedge-everything memos.

• Excellent drafting and communication skills, with the ability to distill complex legal issues into clear, actionable guidance for engineers, product managers, and business leaders alike.

• Experience working cross-functionally with product, engineering, design, and policy teams throughout the product development lifecycle.

• Sound judgment and the confidence to assess risk against business goals and make informed calls with imperfect facts.

• Comfort operating on a small team and getting in the weeds to produce results in a highly ambiguous environment. You are scrappy, put team over ego, and are willing to take on additional responsibilities.

Nice to Have

• Experience at a consumer marketplace, e-commerce, live streaming, video, social commerce, user-generated content, or other two-sided platform company.

• Experience advising on artificial intelligence and machine learning products, including generative AI and recommendation systems.

• Experience building playbooks, templates, or self-serve legal resources at a high-growth company.

• Experience with online safety, content moderation, or youth safety issues on a live or user-generated content platform.

• Experience with data security incident management and working alongside an operational privacy team.

🎁 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.

Please note: Whatnot will only contact you through official @whatnot.com email addresses. If you see an email impersonating a Whatnot recruiter, please disregard and report it as spam.

💛 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.