engineering
Posted Apr 24Staff Backend Engineer - Search FX (Discovery Experience)
at Faire
CanadaHybrid
Responsibilities
- Architect Next-Gen Search: Lead the design of composable grids, intent-aware routing, and orchestration layers that unify retrieval and ranking.
- Optimize Performance: Drive initiatives to increase retrieval candidates (e.g., 10x growth) while maintaining stable search latency.
- Launch AI-Driven Features: Develop systems like "Search Missions" that use offline pipelines and LLMs to recover failed search sessions through expanded queries.
Requirements
- At Faire, we're using the power of tech, data, and machine learning to connect this thriving community of entrepreneurs across the globe.
- 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.
- You will own the technical roadmap for search, recommendations, and Gen-AI experiences that drive a meaningful share of marketplace engagement.
- You’ll build at the AI frontier: Integrate LLM-powered capabilities, such as natural language search and intelligent query understanding, directly into the product.
- Modernize Query Understanding: Leverage LLMs to consolidate the QU stack, improving accuracy for long-tail queries and edge cases.
- Bridge AI and UX: Work with client engineers on SDUI and React Server Components to improve performance and developer velocity for dynamic search layouts.
- Product Sensibility: A strong user-first mindset and the ability to translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical direction. AI/ML Familiarity:
- Experience partnering with Data Science to deploy and leverage machine learning and gen-AI systems in search experiences across ranking and retrieval.
- Domain Expertise: knowledge of search/query processing, including traditional, semantic, and hybrid frameworks (e.g., Elasticsearch, Lucene).
- Technical Stack: Strong programming skills in Kotlin or Java, with
- experience in high-performance backend systems, Protocol Buffers, and MySQL.
- Strategic Leadership: Demonstrated ability to contribute to team strategy without supervision and influence the broader organizational roadmap. Technologies We Use and Teach:
- Backend: Kotlin, Java 16, Hibernate, Guice, Jersey