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Faire
Senior Engineering Manager - Search Infrastructure
About Faire
Faire is an online wholesale marketplace built on the belief that the future is local — independent retailers around the globe are doing more revenue than Walmart and Amazon combined, but individually, they are small compared to these massive entities. At Faire, we're using the power of tech, data, and machine learning to connect this thriving community of entrepreneurs across the globe. Picture your favorite boutique in town — we help them discover the best products from around the world to sell in their stores. With the right tools and insights, we believe that we can level the playing field so that small businesses everywhere can compete with these big box and e-commerce giants.
By supporting the growth of independent businesses, Faire is driving positive economic impact in local communities, globally. We’re looking for smart, resourceful and passionate people to join us as we power the shop local movement. If you believe in community, come join ours.
About this role
The Search Infrastructure team at Faire is the backbone of discovery, ensuring that every retailer has a fast, relevant, and reliable search experience. Our mission is to build the best in class search infrastructure that’s most scalable, high-performance, intellectual, and reliable search infrastructure that enables internal teams to rapidly iterate while providing best-in-class experiences for our users.
We are looking for an experienced Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Search Infrastructure team. In this role, you will work closely with search relevance, machine learning, and other infrastructure teams to scale our search platform, ensuring it remains performant and reliable as Faire continues to grow. Your focus will be on building a high-scale, low-latency, and reliable search stack while driving innovation in search and retrieval technologies..
What you’ll do
- Define and execute the technical vision for Faire’s search infrastructure, ensuring it scales efficiently while maintaining high availability and performance—empowering the search algorithm to drive continuous innovation and transformative discovery experiences.
- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of experienced engineers working on search systems, fostering a culture of excellence and ownership.
- Optimize search performance and reliability, improving indexing, query execution, and real-time updates across large-scale datasets.
- Enable rapid experimentation for relevance and ranking teams by building flexible, scalable, and observable search infrastructure.
- Scale search infrastructure to handle growing traffic, global expansion, and increasing complexity in search retrieval and personalization.
- Improve search observability, building monitoring, alerting, and analytics to proactively detect and mitigate issues.
- Drive collaboration across engineering teams, ensuring seamless integration of ML-based ranking and retrieval models.
- Attract, hire, and retain top engineering talent, fostering an inclusive and diverse team culture that encourages innovation and psychological safety.
- Work closely with leadership to align search infrastructure investments with Faire’s business and engineering priorities.
You Might Thrive in this Role If You:
- Have deep expertise in search infrastructure, including indexing, query optimization, and distributed search architectures (e.g., Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Vespa, Lucene).
- Have scaled high-performance search systems to support rapid growth and increasing complexity.
- Have a strong background in distributed systems, data processing, caching strategies, and search observability.
- Are passionate about search reliability and performance, with experience designing high-availability systems that support mission-critical workloads.
- Have experience leading engineering teams, with a track record of building and growing high-performing, inclusive teams.
- Enjoy collaborating across disciplines, working closely with relevance engineers, ML teams, and product engineers to deliver end-to-end search improvements.
- Are comfortable navigating ambiguity and fast-changing conditions, bringing structure and clarity to complex problems.
- Have experience working with cloud-native architectures, leveraging AWS, Kubernetes, and modern search infrastructure tooling.
- Believe in a culture of radical candor and psychological safety, encouraging diverse viewpoints and open discussion.
Qualifications
- Expertise in search and retrieval technologies, focusing on scalability, fault tolerance, and search performance optimization.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 10+ years of experience in engineering roles, with at least 5 years in leadership positions managing large-scale infrastructure or systems engineering teams.
- Proven experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, distributed search systems.
- Strong leadership and communication skills, with a track record of hiring and retaining top engineering talent.
- Experience in strategic planning and execution at a senior organizational level, aligning technical roadmaps with business priorities.
Salary range
Canada: the pay range for this role is $184,000 - $253,000 per year.
This role will also be eligible for equity and benefits. Actual base pay will be determined based on permissible factors such as transferable skills, work experience, market demands, and primary work location. The base pay range provided is subject to change and may be modified in the future.
This role will be in-office on a hybrid schedule - Faire employees will be expected to go into the office 2 days per week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, effective the week of January 13, 2025. Additionally, in-office roles will have the flexibility to work remotely up to 4 weeks per year.
Applications for this position will be accepted for a minimum of 30 days from the posting date.
Why you’ll love working at Faire
- We are entrepreneurs: Faire is being built for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs. We believe entrepreneurship is a calling and our mission is to empower entrepreneurs to chase their dreams. Every member of our team is taking part in the founding process.
- We are using technology and data to level the playing field: We are leveraging the power of product innovation and machine learning to connect brands and boutiques from all over the world, building a growing community of more than 350,000 small business owners.
- We build products our customers love: Everything we do is ultimately in the service of helping our customers grow their business because our goal is to grow the pie - not steal a piece from it. Running a small business is hard work, but using Faire makes it easy.
- We are curious and resourceful: Inquisitive by default, we explore every possibility, test every assumption, and develop creative solutions to the challenges at hand. We lead with curiosity and data in our decision making, and reason from a first principles mentality.
Faire was founded in 2017 by a team of early product and engineering leads from Square. We’re backed by some of the top investors in retail and tech including: Y Combinator, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Forerunner Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, and DST Global. We have headquarters in San Francisco and Kitchener-Waterloo, and a global employee presence across offices in Toronto, London, and New York. To learn more about Faire and our customers, you can read more on our blog.
Faire provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.
Faire is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment, its services, programs, and activities. Accommodations are available throughout the recruitment process and applicants with a disability may request to be accommodated throughout the recruitment process. We will work with all applicants to accommodate their individual accessibility needs. To request reasonable accommodation, please fill out our Accommodation Request Form (https://bit.ly/faire-form)
Top Skills
Faire Kitchener, Ontario, CAN Office
260 King Street West, 205, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, N2G 1B6
Faire Toronto, Ontario, CAN Office
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Faire Waterloo, Ontario, CAN Office
85 Willis Way, Waterloo, ON, Canada, N2J 0B9
