Staff Backend Engineer - Search FX (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 Search team (Search FX) sits at the intersection of search, evaluation, 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. As a Staff Engineer on the Search FX team, you will be a primary technical architect for our retailer-facing search surfaces. You will own the technical roadmap for search, recommendations, and Gen-AI experiences that drive a meaningful share of marketplace engagement. You will bridge the gap between high-scale infrastructure and world-class UX, helping unify retrieval, ranking, and personalization into a cohesive, high-performance system. You’re excited about this role because... You will own the technical vision: Define the end-to-end architecture for Faire's search and discovery experience, ensuring it is fast, relevant, and deeply personalized. You’ll build at the AI frontier: Integrate LLM-powered capabilities, such as natural language search and intelligent query understanding, directly into the product. You’ll solve complex scale problems: Help build high-scale, low-latency systems that navigate millions of products while meeting strict industry latency benchmarks. You’ll drive cross-functional impact: Partner closely with Data Science, Product, and Design to iterate on ranking models and UX components. You’ll be a mentor and leader: Foster a culture of engineering excellence and ownership, upskilling the team on technical expertise and decision-making. What You'll Do: Architect Next-Gen Search: Lead the design of composable grids, intent-aware routing, and orchestration layers that unify retrieval and ranking. Modernize Query Understanding: Leverage LLMs to consolidate the QU stack, improving accuracy for long-tail queries and edge cases. 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. Bridge AI and UX: Work with client engineers on SDUI and React Server Components to improve performance and developer velocity for dynamic search layouts. System Ownership: Take accountability for the reliability and observability of the search funnel, from query planner refactors to real-time retrieval monitoring. Qualifications: Experience: 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years as a technical leader driving complex, cross-team projects. 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 framew