Staff Backend Engineer - AI-Driven Search & Discovery

Faire; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 231,000 - 318,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Benefits

Job summary

Faire seeks a leader to define the end-to-end search and discovery architecture, integrating LLM-powered capabilities for intelligent, fast results. You will work across Data Science, Product, and Design to iterate on ranking and UX, while solving scale challenges for millions of products.

You will mentor a team of engineers, foster ownership, and drive architectural decisions that deliver a delightful, personalized shopping experience for retailers worldwide.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years in technical leadership.
• Strong user-first mindset; translate problems into clear technical direction.
• Experience deploying ML and gen-AI in search experiences.
• Knowledge of search/query processing (semantic/hybrid).
• Proficient in Kotlin or Java and backend system design.

Responsibilities

• Architect Next-Gen Search and ranking systems for scalable discovery.
• Modernize query understanding using LLMs for accurate long-tail results.
• Improve performance while increasing retrieval candidates and maintaining latency.
• Launch AI-driven features and integrate offline pipelines with LLMs.
• Collaborate with Data Science, Product, and Design to iterate on ranking.
• Mentor engineers; promote ownership and technical excellence.

Skills

Kotlin

Java

AI/ML Familiarity

System design

Leadership

Tools

Elasticsearch

Lucene

MySQL

Protocol Buffers

AWS

Kubernetes

Job description

Faire seeks a leader to define the end-to-end search and discovery architecture, integrating LLM-powered capabilities for intelligent, fast results. You will work across Data Science, Product, and Design to iterate on ranking and UX, while solving scale challenges for millions of products.

You will mentor a team of engineers, foster ownership, and drive architectural decisions that deliver a delightful, personalized shopping experience for retailers worldwide.