Staff Engineer, Platform Infrastructure Kitchener-Waterloo, ON; Toronto, ON

Faire; San Francisco, New York (CA, NY); Hybrid; USD 184,000 - 253,000; Full time

Job summary

An established industry player is seeking an experienced technical leader to drive the architecture and infrastructure of an innovative online marketplace. This role focuses on developing a technology strategy that enhances performance, scalability, and reliability while mentoring a talented team. Join a forward-thinking company that empowers entrepreneurs and supports local communities through technology and data-driven solutions. You'll play a crucial role in shaping the future of independent retail, making a significant impact on small businesses worldwide. If you're passionate about technology and community, this opportunity is perfect for you.

Benefits

Equity options

Flexible remote work (4 weeks/year)

In-office collaboration

Professional development opportunities

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in architecture and running distributed systems.
• Strong interest in performance and scalability problem-solving.
• Proven leadership in mentoring engineers across teams.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute technology strategy to scale with growth.
• Lead team planning and prioritize urgent and long-term needs.
• Provide technical guidance on complex open-ended problems.

Skills

Architecture of distributed systems

Performance optimization

Scalability solutions

Technical mentorship

Strong communication skills

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Software Engineering

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Elasticsearch

Redis

Dynamo

Datadog

Cloudflare

PagerDuty

Kotlin

Job description

Faire is an online wholesale marketplace built on the belief that the future is local — independent retailers around the globe are doing more revenue than Walmart and Amazon combined, but individually, they are small compared to these massive entities. 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 that small businesses everywhere can compete with these big box and e-commerce giants.

By supporting the growth of independent businesses, Faire is driving 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:

• SLOs
• Caching systems and low-latency practices
• Database stability & performance
• Cost / performance optimization
• Monitoring & observability
• Orchestrated safe change management

The team also owns relationships with select infrastructure vendors.

We’re looking for: An experienced technical leader with substantial architecture and infrastructure experience to work alongside our highly talented team, develop and deliver on a technical roadmap, and engage with teams organization-wide.

What you’ll do:

• Define and execute a technology strategy that scales with our growth; contribute to our architecture with a focus on performance, scalability, reliability, monitoring/alerting.
• Engage and lead 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:

• Extensive experience developing architecture, building, 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
• A record of leading teams to higher levels of contribution and mentoring Engineers, both in immediate team and organization-wide (200+ engineers)
• Strong communication skills; ability to bring disparate groups of people to a shared understanding
• 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, Elasticsearch, Redis, Dynamo, Datadog, Cloudflare, PagerDuty, Kotlin

Salary range:

Canada: the pay range for this role is $184,000 - $253,000 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.

This role will be in-office on a hybrid schedule - Faire employees will be expected to go into the office 2 days per week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, effective the week of January 13, 2025. Additionally, in-office roles will have the flexibility to work remotely up to 4 weeks per year.

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.