Senior Staff Backend Engineer – Discovery AI Infrastructure & Enablement

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.

Faire is using machine learning and AI to change wholesale and help local retailers compete with Amazon and big box stores. Our experienced team of engineers and data scientists are developing solutions related to discovery, ranking, search, and recommendations – all with the goal of helping local retail thrive. Our Engineering team in collaboration with the Data team owns a wide variety of machine learning systems that power the marketplace. We care about good engineering practice and love to write software that is secure, tested, easy to maintain, and can scale to millions of users. We build minimum viable products, deploy to production multiple times per day, A/B test customer-facing changes, listen to the data, and iterate.

Job Summary

As a technical leader on the Discovery Infra and Enablement team, you will be responsible for building and scaling the next generation of Search and AI infrastructure at Faire. You’ll unlock new agentic features, enable cutting-edge retrieval and ranking applications, and ensure our search experience is world-class in both relevance and latency.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and optimize the next-generation Discovery Search and AI stack, integrating LLMs, semantic search, dense vector retrieval, embeddings, and reinforcement learning to serve personalized results with <100ms latency.
• Lead the design and productionization of natural language search and intelligent discovery systems, enabling AI agents to generate relevant collections, explain results, and support retailers in browsing, filtering, and evaluation.
• Tackle deep technical challenges in query understanding, retrieval efficiency, and multi-stage ranking pipelines.
• Develop infrastructure to support state-of-the-art search algorithms while optimizing for cost, speed, and accuracy at scale.
• Shape the technical strategy for how applied AI is leveraged across search and discovery at Faire.
• Collaborate with Data Scientists, Product Managers, and ML Engineers to translate business needs into technical solutions.