About Faire

Faire is an online wholesale marketplace built on the belief that the future is local ?" there are over 2 million independent retailers in North America and Europe doing more than $2 trillion in revenue. 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

Faire is using machine learning to change wholesale and help local retailers compete with Amazon and big box stores. Our experienced machine learning engineers and data scientists are developing solutions related to discovery, ranking, search, recommendations, logistics, underwriting, and more - all with the goal of helping local retail thrive. The data team owns a wide variety of algorithms and models that power the marketplace. We care about building machine learning models that help our customers thrive.

As a technical lead of the Search & Recommendation team you'll be responsible for developing systems that set the foundations required to enable real-time machine learning-powered search ranking models. You'll determine answers to questions like, how can we scale our real-time pipeline to handle 3x the load? How fast we serve real-time embeddings of users' interests and use them to power rankings? How do these systems scale as we onboard more and more surfaces? What new techniques are emerging in the market that would empower our data scientists to do cutting-edge work? Our team already includes experienced Machine Learning Engineers and Data Scientists from Uber, Airbnb, Square, Facebook, and Pinterest. Faire will soon be known as a top destination for MLE and data scientists, and you will help take us there!

You're excited about this role because...

You're passionate about building reliable, observable, maintainable and scalable systems
You'll be able to work on cutting-edge systems that facilitate retrieval and ranking at scale such as Elasticsearch, Redis, and more!
You want to use machine learning to help local retailers and independent brands succeed
You want to be a critical Team Lead of a fast growing company
You like to solve challenging problems related to a two-sided marketplace

Qualifications

5+ years of industry experience in machine learning organizations building scalable machine learning model inference systems
Experience leading a team of machine learning engineers and managing project roadmapping with data, product, and other engineering teams
A history of mentoring other machine learning engineers, if not being a direct manager and scaling a team successfully
Strong communication skills and the ability to lead and work with others in a closely collaborative team environment
Strong fundamental programming skills such as Object oriented programming, systems design, functional programming
Experience with different types of data stores (relational databases, NoSQL databases, key-value stores)
Strong machine learning background, experience in building and productionizing machine learning models

Great to Haves:

Highly recommended: Master's or PhD in Computer Science or Software Engineering or other related fields
Experience with numerous different backend and data tech stacks to understand the benefits and tradeoffs of various technologies

Faire's flexible work model aims to meet the needs of our diverse employee community by making work more flexible, connected, and inclusive. Depending on the role and needs of the team, Faire employees have the flexibility to choose how they work?"whether that's mainly in the office, remotely, or a mix of both.

Roles that list only a country in the location are eligible for fully remote work in that country or in- office work at a Faire office in that country, provided employees are located in the registered country/province/state. Roles with only a city location are eligible for in-office or hybrid office work in that city. Our talent team will work with candidates to determine what locations and roles are eligible for each option.

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 an owner of the business and 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 Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Toronto, London, New York, LA, and Sao Paulo. 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. To request reasonable accommodation, please fill out our Accommodation Request Form.

Summary
Company name: Faire Wholesale, Inc.
Remote job title: Staff Machine Learning Engineer & Technical Lead Search & Recommendation
Job tags: Machine Learning, functional programming, System Design