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Senior Staff Backend Engineer

Faire7 days ago
Toronto
CA$156,827 - CA$215,638/yearly
Senior Level

Top Benefits

Comprehensive healthcare coverage
Paid vacation, holidays, and company-wide “Fundays”
Monthly wellness credit

About the role

Who you are

  • 8+ years of industry experience building and scaling distributed systems, with strong fundamentals in distributed infra
  • 5+ years working on search, ranking, or query understanding systems at scale
  • Hands-on experience with traditional, semantic, and hybrid search frameworks (e.g. Elasticsearch, Lucene, Solr, FAISS, Vespa, Weaviate, Milvus)
  • Expertise in search indexing, retrieval, and ranking pipelines, including query rewriting, personalization, embeddings, and vector search
  • Experience with ML-driven search systems, including personalization, re-ranking, and reinforcement learning
  • Strong knowledge of latency optimization and building low-latency, high-throughput serving systems
  • Familiarity with AI/ML infra such as model serving (e.g. TensorFlow Serving, TorchServe, Ray Serve), feature stores, and online experimentation
  • Proficiency in at least one modern backend language (Java, Kotlin, Go, or Python)
  • Solid understanding of APIs, distributed data storage, and streaming systems (e.g. Kafka, Flink, Spark)
  • Excellent communication skills and a proven track record of technical leadership and mentorship
  • Experience with applied LLM integration into production systems (agentic, multi-turn chat experience, conversational search, etc)
  • Contributions to open-source search/ML infra projects

What the job involves

  • 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
  • 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 scalable technical solutions

Benefits

  • Comprehensive healthcare
  • All of our offices have been designed with local in mind—from our architects to our coffee blends
  • Paid vacation time, holidays, and company-wide “Faire Fundays.”
  • Including a monthly credit toward your wellness-related programs
  • Generous parental and family leave, as well as fertility support benefits
  • Including free access to Modern Health therapists and resources
  • Optional morning meditation, plus a free Headspace membership
  • Faire will match up to US$250 of your charitable donations, every year
  • For personal and professional development, as well as unlimited access to training courses through LinkedIn Learning
  • Whether you want to grow as a leader, hone your craft, or explore a new discipline, our career framework allows space for you to explore

About Faire

Software Development
1001-5000

Empowering brands and retailers to strengthen the unique character of local communities.