Senior Trust & Risk Team Lead, Appeals

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. We’re re-defining e-commerce by blending community, shopping, and entertainment into a community just for you. As a remote co-located team, we’re inspired by innovation and anchored in our values. With hubs in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, and Poland, we’re building the future of online marketplaces –together.

From fashion, beauty, and electronics to collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants, our live auctions have something for everyone.

And we’re just getting started! As one of the fastest growing marketplaces, we’re looking for bold, forward-thinking problem solvers across all functional areas. 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.

As Senior Team Lead, Appeals, you’ll manage a pod of appeals specialists while supporting our appeals and operational framework that scales with Trust & Risk. You’ll run day-to-day triage and re-review workflows, set evidence standards, and partner cross-functionally to ensure fair, fast, and consistent outcomes. Your work improves user trust, reduces wrongful enforcement, and closes the loop on policy clarity.

Lead & operate

• Manage an appeals pod (hiring input, onboarding, coaching, performance).

• Own daily execution: intake/triage, evidence gathering, second-level review, and timely resolutions across priority queues.

• Handle high-severity or sensitive appeals; approve exceptions and ensure conflict-of-interest controls.

• Take the lead on high severity incidents in an area of expertise.

• Be the go-to expert for your area of focus, and be able to provide recommendations for escalations or questions from anyone in the company.

Build the team & framework

• Help stand up the Appeals operating model: roles, SLAs, triage taxonomy, and weekly rhythm (calibration, case council).

• Define decision templates and evidence standards; maintain playbooks and version-controlled guidance.

• Establish escalation paths (Policy/Legal/Product) and criteria for reinstatement vs. uphold decisions.

Measure & improve

• Partner with Data to instrument dashboards and track Time to Resolve, First Touch Response, and partner with decision quality team to ensure decision quality of appeals specialists is tracked and goaled.

• Publish weekly insights and root-cause themes; drive fixes with Ops, Policy, Product, and Legal.

• Contribute requirements to tooling (appeals intake, evidence checklists, audit trails, alerts) and lightweight automation.

Enablement

• Train frontline teams on appeals standards and comms; certify readiness and spot-check adoption.

• Coordinate change management for new policies/features and volume spikes; maintain user-facing macros/templates that reflect policy.

• 7+ years in Trust & Safety, Risk Ops, Support Ops, or Quality; 2+ years leading operators or specialists.

• Hands-on experience with re-review/appeals or escalations; strong judgment on edge cases and evidence.

• Analytical; comfortable with spreadsheets/Sigma (SQL preferred) and actionable dashboards.

• Excellent communicator across Ops, Policy, Product, Data, and Legal; strong enablement and documentation habits.

• Growth mindset; balances speed, fairness, and compliance in a fast-moving environment.

Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance of our Phoenix, AZ hub.

• 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.

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.