Staff Machine Learning Engineer & TLM - Search & Recommendation

About Faire

Faire is an online wholesale marketplace built on the belief that the future of retail is local. There are over 1M independent retailers in the U.S. and Canada doing more than twice the revenue of Walmart and Amazon combined. At Faire, we're using the power of technology and data to connect a growing community of over 150,000 brands and independent retailers around the world. Picture your favorite boutique in town — we help them discover the best products to sell in their stores. By empowering entrepreneurs with the right tools and insights, we believe that we can level the playing field so that small businesses can compete with big box and e-commerce giants. 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 the lead of the Search & Recommendation Infrastructure 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 foundational 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

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 200,000 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 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.