Senior Backend Engineer - Faire, Kitchener-Waterloo

About the Role: Senior Backend Engineer, Brand Platform

Faire is a leading technology wholesale platform dedicated to empowering local businesses and independent retailers globally. We leverage the power of tech, data, and machine learning to connect a thriving community of entrepreneurs. Our mission is to level the playing field, helping businesses grow and local communities thrive by providing the right tools and insights.

The Brand engineering team at Faire is crucial, owning the code that enables our brands to manage their operations on the platform. This includes everything from managing product listings and fulfilling orders to communicating effectively with retailers. This specific Senior Backend Engineer position is within the Brand Platform sub-team, focusing on establishing a robust foundation for other customer-facing teams to build upon.

We are committed to excellent engineering practices, crafting software that is secure, thoroughly tested, easy to maintain, and scalable to millions of users. Our approach involves building minimum viable products, deploying to production multiple times daily, A/B testing customer-facing changes, carefully listening to the data, and continuously iterating based on insights.

Responsibilities

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Brand Platform team, you will collaborate closely with colleagues to enhance our core services and infrastructure. Your contributions will be vital in defining system architecture and implementing solutions that support our global community of brands. Key responsibilities include:

• Define clear service boundaries for scalable and maintainable systems.
• Build out AI enablement features for common tasks within the team, enhancing efficiency.
• Optimize the performance of our highest contention data models to ensure responsiveness.
• Deliver core features for our Kotlin server, driving platform stability and functionality.
• Design and build new APIs that will be consumed by both our website and mobile applications.
• Help the product team continuously improve our customer's experience through robust backend solutions.

What You'll Bring

We are seeking passionate and resourceful engineering professionals who are eager to contribute to a dynamic team. Ideal applicants will demonstrate a strong technical foundation and a proactive approach to problem-solving. We're excited about candidates who possess:

• A passion for programming and effectively solving complex problems with code.
• Demonstrable examples of using AI to automate large-scale quality improvements in existing code bases.
• A deep understanding of NewSQL relational databases, such as CockroachDB.
• Experience in digging into engineering productivity challenges and identifying opportunities for improvements across multiple teams.
• A genuine love for technology and an insatiable curiosity for exploring new tools to tackle real-world problems.

Our team actively uses and teaches technologies including Kotlin, Java, JUnit, Hibernate, Guice, Jersey, HTTP, JSON, Protocol Buffers, MySQL, CockroachDB, and AWS. Experience with these technologies will be highly valued.

What's On Offer at Faire

Joining Faire means becoming part of a vibrant community that values innovation, growth, and impact. We believe in providing an environment where every employee can thrive and contribute meaningfully to our mission. Here’s what you can expect when you build your career with us:

• Move fast: You'll own meaningful problems that serve customers around the globe, with the agency to move quickly and clearly see the results of your work.
• Equipped to scale: We invest in what matters, including the latest enterprise AI tools, to help you work smarter and get more out of every day.
• Best in class: Our team is full of sharp, kind, and generous colleagues who care deeply about their craft and are committed to helping you grow in yours.
• Real rewards: We offer competitive pay, equity, and comprehensive benefits designed to support your life both inside and outside of work.
• Belonging: We are intentional about building an environment where every Faire employee has equal access to opportunities, growth, and success.

Faire was founded in 2017 by a team of early product and engineering leads from Square and is backed by top investors in retail and tech. With headquarters in San Francisco and Kitchener-Waterloo, and a global employee presence, we are committed to fostering an inclusive environment for all applicants.