Intermediate Engineer - Platform Infrastructure

Faire; Kitchener; Hybrid; CAD 125,000 - 157,000; Full time

Job summary

A growing tech company in Kitchener is seeking an Engineering professional to enhance their marketplace infrastructure. The role emphasizes performance, scalability, and reliability in technology projects. Candidates should have a background in developing distributed systems and strong communication abilities, as well as a degree in Computer Science or related field. A competitive salary between $125,000 - $157,000 annually is offered.

Benefits

Competitive salary

Flexible remote work

Equity options

Supportive workplace culture

Qualifications

• Experience running distributed systems and addressing production issues.
• Interest in performance and scalability problems.
• Strong communication skills required.

Responsibilities

• Plan and execute technology projects that scale with growth.
• Engage in team planning and prioritization.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship.

Skills

Distributed systems development

Performance problem-solving

Strong communication skills

Public cloud infrastructure

Networking knowledge

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Software Engineering

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

Datadog

Job description

Overview

Faire is an online wholesale marketplace built on the belief that the future is local. At Faire, we connect independent retailers with products from around the world to help them grow their stores. We aim to level the playing field so that small businesses can compete with larger retailers.

By supporting the growth of independent businesses, Faire drives 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

Our Engineering organization owns the software that makes our marketplace work. Our Core Platform Infrastructure group enables product engineering teams to build and operate software with unmatched speed and quality. We care about good engineering practices, excellent developer experience, security, testability, ease of maintenance, and scaling to serve millions of users. The team builds and operates infrastructure used by all Faire services. It drives best practices to achieve excellent availability and performance.

The team focuses on the following areas and capabilities:

• Rate limiting & retries
• Circuit breaking
• Load testing
• Fault injection
• SLOs
• Cost / performance optimization
• Monitoring & observability
• Caching systems and low-latency practices
• Database stability & performance
• Orchestrated safe change management

The team also owns relationships with select infrastructure vendors.

What you’ll do

• Plan and execute on technology projects that scale with our growth; contribute to our architecture with a focus on performance, scalability, reliability, monitoring/alerting.
• Engage with team planning and prioritization, balancing urgent and near-term needs with long-term goals.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship on difficult open-ended problems.

Qualifications

• Experience developing and running distributed systems, diagnosing, mitigating, and permanently addressing production issues at scale
• An interest in solving low-level performance problems and high-level system scalability problems
• Strong communication skills
• A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Software Engineering or equivalent industry experience
• Networking (across the entire stack)
• Public cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred)
• Caching and storage, both RDBMS and non-relational
• Scaling high-volume, high-traffic systems
• Observability, distributed tracing, root cause analysis
• Capacity cost tradeoffs
• Select technologies we use and teach: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Cloudflare, PagerDuty, Elasticsearch, Redis, Dynamo, Datadog, Kotlin

Salary range

Canada: the pay range for this role is $125,000 - $157,000 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 2 days per week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Effective starting in January 2026, employees will be expected to go into the office on 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. Applications for this position will be accepted for a minimum of 30 days from the posting date.

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 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 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.