Senior Staff Data Engineer - Faire, Kitchener-Waterloo

The opportunity

Faire is a leading technology wholesale platform dedicated to empowering independent retailers and local communities globally. By leveraging tech, data, and machine learning, Faire connects a thriving community of entrepreneurs, enabling small businesses to discover and sell unique products from around the world. This focus on local economies makes Faire a unique and impactful place to build your career in data engineering.

The Engineering organization at Faire is the backbone of our marketplace, and the Platform group is crucial to its success. This group empowers various teams, including Product Engineering, Data Science, Product Management, Strategy, Analytics, and Finance, by providing robust underlying infrastructure. We enable product engineering teams to build and operate software with unmatched speed and quality, focusing on excellent developer experience, security, testability, ease of maintenance, and scaling to serve millions of users.

This Senior Staff Data Engineer role is for a highly experienced technical leader in the data space, whose influence will span multiple Platform and Product groups. You will play a pivotal role in shaping Faire's data future, contributing to critical initiatives that support our global growth and mission. This is an excellent opportunity for those seeking impactful engineering jobs in Kitchener-Waterloo.

Within the Platform group, you will interact with and influence the Data Infrastructure team, which builds and operates a secure, reliable, cost-efficient platform for data ingestion, storage, compute, orchestration, and governance. You will also collaborate with the Analytics Platform team, which focuses on efficient data warehousing capabilities, foundational data assets, and tools to accelerate data-driven analytics, aiming to reduce the time from data to insights. Additionally, this role influences and interacts with all data and analytics related functions at Faire, including product analytics engineering (PAE) and data science (DS) teams.

Key duties

As a Senior Staff Data Engineer, you will be a technical leader with significant experience in data and analytics. You will work alongside and lead/influence multiple teams and departments, defining technology strategy, roadmaps, architecture patterns, and guidance. This role strikes a balance between technical leadership and hands-on development. Your responsibilities will include:

• Planning and executing on technology projects that scale with Faire’s growth, leading architecture development with a focus on data integrity, security, performance, scale, reliability, and monitoring/alerting.
• Engaging with team planning and prioritization, balancing urgent and near-term needs with long-term goals for our data platform.
• Providing technical guidance and mentorship on the most difficult open-ended problems we face, including cost-efficient compute and storage, ETL and ELT pipelines, data ingest and warehousing.
• Overseeing monitoring, alerting, and cost tracking for data workloads, and guiding design practices for foundational data assets.
• Ensuring data security, privacy, and governance across all data engineering initiatives.

What you'll bring

We are looking for a highly skilled and experienced individual to join our engineering teams. To excel in this Senior Staff Data Engineer role, you should possess a strong background in data and analytics, coupled with proven leadership capabilities. The ideal candidate will have:

• Experience designing, developing, and operating data streaming, batch, ETL/ELT, orchestration, storage, compute, and workflow systems at scale.
• Experience defining architecture patterns and building reliable, scalable data pipelines, orchestration of data movement, querying, transformation, and frameworks for analytics engineering workflows.
• Strong SQL and Python skills and experience.
• Data warehousing experience at Petabyte scale.
• Snowflake, Airflow, and Spark experience, which are especially valuable.
• Understanding of performance, capacity, and cost trade-offs in data processing systems, with experience in guiding technical and product teams on such trade-offs.
• Experience diagnosing, mitigating, and permanently addressing data system production issues at scale, and rolling out patterns for workload performance and cost optimization.
• Experience operating in a growth stage company, with a data function consisting of multiple teams and over 60 people, enabling teams to operate in a self-serve model.
• Excellent communication, leadership, and influencing skills.
• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Software Engineering or equivalent industry experience.

Our selected technologies, which we use and teach, include AWS, Snowflake, Airflow, Spark, Python, and Kotlin. Your experience with these tools will be a significant asset to our platform engineering efforts.

Why you'll love it here

Joining Faire means becoming part of a community that values innovation, growth, and impact. If you're looking for Faire jobs where you can make a real difference, consider these benefits:

• Move fast: You'll own meaningful problems that serve customers around the globe with the agency to move fast and see your results clearly.
• 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 about their craft and about helping you grow in yours.
• Real rewards: Competitive pay, equity, and comprehensive benefits designed to support your life inside and outside of work.
• Belonging: We're 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 across offices in Toronto, London, and New York, Faire offers exciting career opportunities. Explore Faire careers and be part of a company that's powering the shop local movement.