Senior Engineering Leader - Discovery Experience

About Faire

Faire is a technology wholesale platform built on the belief that the future is local. Independent retailers around the globe collectively represent a multi-hundred-billion-dollar wholesale market that has historically been fragmented and offline. 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 businesses can grow and local communities can thrive.

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 the Role:

The Discovery Experience team at Faire sits at the intersection of search, evaluate, and personalization — shaping how retailers find the products they love. Our mission is to build the most intuitive, intelligent, and delightful discovery experience in wholesale: one that feels less like a search engine and more like a trusted merchant with an encyclopedic knowledge of what's in stock and what will sell.

We're looking for an experienced leader to lead our Discovery Experience team. In this role, you will partner closely with product, design, and machine learning teams to craft search and discovery experiences that are fast, relevant, and deeply personalized. You bring a strong point of view on what great search UX looks like, you believe AI is transforming how people find things, and you're excited to build at that frontier.

You will own a critical part of the discovery experience, spanning search, recommendations, and Gen-AI experience that drives a meaningful share of marketplace engagement, conversion, and retailer success. This role sits at the center of some of Faire’s most important product and technical challenges: building high-scale, low-latency systems that help retailers navigate millions of products with speed, relevance, and trust, while pushing the frontier of AI-powered discovery.

As a leader in Discovery, you will shape not only team execution, but also the longer-term technical and organizational direction of discovery at Faire — influencing strategy across product engineering, ML, and infrastructure. You’ll help unify retrieval, ranking, personalization, and UX into a cohesive system, while enabling fast experimentation and measurable business impact.

What You'll Do:

• Define and execute the technical vision for Faire's discovery experience, spanning search UX, recommendations, and AI-powered discovery, ensuring every retailer can effortlessly find what they're looking for.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of engineers focused on the retailer-facing discovery surface, fostering a culture of craft, ownership, and continuous learning.
• Drive the integration of Algo and AI/LLM-powered capabilities into the discovery experience — from natural language search to intelligent query understanding and personalized results.
• Partner with product and design to raise the bar on search UX, ensuring the experience is intuitive, accessible, and optimized for how retailers actually shop.
• Enable rapid experimentation across discovery surfaces, working closely with ML teams to iterate on ranking, surfacing, and personalization.
• Champion observability and quality across the discovery stack, building the right instrumentation to understand user behavior and proactively improve the experience.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration across relevance, ML, infrastructure, and product engineering to deliver cohesive, end-to-end discovery improvements.
• Attract, hire, and retain top engineering talent, fostering an inclusive and psychologically safe team culture that encourages bold ideas and diverse perspectives.
• Work closely with leadership to align discovery investments with Faire's growth strategy and marketplace priorities.

You Might Thrive in this Role If You:

• Have experience building search or discovery products end-to-end, with a strong appreciation for the interplay between UX, relevance, and infrastructure.
• Are genuinely excited about AI-powered discovery — you've worked with LLMs, semantic search, or conversational interfaces and believe they're reshaping how people find things.
• Have a user-first mindset: you think deeply about search UX, query understanding, and how small UI decisions drive big differences in retailer satisfaction and conversion.
• Have a strong background in building and shipping consumer or B2B product features at scale, with experience collaborating closely with product and design.
• Have led high-performing engineering teams, with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
• Enjoy working across disciplines — with relevance engineers, ML practitioners, product managers, and designers — to deliver experiences that are greater than the sum of their parts.
• Are comfortable navigating ambiguity and bringing clarity and structure to complex, multi-team problems.
• Believe in a culture of radical candor and psychological safety, and lead by example in encouraging diverse viewpoints and open discussion.

Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience in engineering roles, with at least 3+ years in engineering leadership positions.
• Demonstrated experience working on search, discovery, recommendations, or related product domains — either on the UX/product side or the relevance/infrastructure side (ideally both).
• Hands-on familiarity with AI and ML-powered product development, including experience integrating or shipping LLM-based features, semantic search, or personalization systems.
• Strong product sensibility and communication skills, with the ability to translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical direction.
• Experience driving cross-functional initiatives and aligning engineering roadmaps with product and business priorities.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Salary range:

San Francisco: The salary range for this role is $231,000 - $318,000 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.

Hybrid Faire employees currently go into the office 3 days per week on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and a third flex day of their choosing (Monday, Wednesday, or Friday). Additionally, hybrid in-office roles will have the flexibility to work remotely up to 4 weeks per year. Specific Workplace and Information Technology positions may require onsite attendance 5 days per week as will be indicated in the job posting. 

Why you’ll love working at Faire

• Move fast: You'll own meaningful problems that serve customers around the globe with the agency to move fast and see your results clearly.
• Equipped to scale: We invest in what matters, including the latest enterprise AI tools, to help you work smarter and get more out of every day.
• Best in class: Our team is full of sharp, kind, and generous colleagues who care about their craft and about helping you grow in yours.
• Real rewards. Competitive pay, equity, and comprehensive benefits designed to support your life inside and outside of work.
• Belonging: We're intentional about building an environment where every Faire employee has equal access to opportunities, growth, and success.

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)

Privacy

For information about the type of personal data Faire collects from applicants, as well as your choices regarding the data collected about you, please visit Faire’s Privacy Notice (https://www.faire.com/privacy)