Staff Backend Engineer - Search FX (Discovery Experience)

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 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
• Search/Data: Elasticsearch, FAISS, Redis, DynamoDB
• Communication: Protocol Buffers, HTTP, JSON
• Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Buildkite, Datadog

Salary Range:

San Francisco: the pay range for this role is $231,000 - $318,000 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.