Staff Data Infrastructure Engineer - Faire, Kitchener-Waterloo

Role overview

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 are using the power of tech, data, and machine learning to connect this thriving community of entrepreneurs across the globe. Our Engineering organization owns the software that makes our marketplace work. The Data Platform group supports everyone at Faire who depends on data, and we are hiring a Staff Engineer to own our data plumbing and lead engineering jobs Kitchener-Waterloo.

Day-to-day

As a Staff Data Infrastructure Engineer among Faire careers, you will be hands-on designing the next version of our data movement platform and building the hard parts personally.

• Set the technical direction for how data moves from production systems into our analytical stores, and own the roadmap to get there over the next couple of years.
• Build the CDC and streaming ingestion layer: CockroachDB changefeeds and MySQL binlogs into Kafka, then into Iceberg tables on S3.
• Implement data contracts and quality checks throughout our platform using tools like Anomalo and Monte Carlo.
• Run Airflow and Fivetran well, and have an opinion about what we should keep buying versus what we should build.
• Own reliability for the platform: SLOs, on-call, incident reviews, and the follow-through so the same thing doesn't break twice.
• Work with senior engineers, data scientists, and analysts who depend on this platform, and lead the migration of existing pipelines.
• Mentor the engineers around you to improve the team's data engineering practice.

Who we're looking for

We are looking for smart, resourceful, and passionate people to join us as we power the shop local movement. Ideal candidates possess the following qualifications:

• You've built and run data infrastructure that other teams depended on, at meaningful scale, and you've been the person setting direction for it.
• Deep experience with change data capture and streaming ingestion from operational databases through Kafka.
• Hands-on experience with lakehouse architectures on an open table format, especially Iceberg on S3.
• Strong Spark skills, and experience running Databricks and Snowflake against shared storage.
• Experience with data quality and observability in practice, including data contracts, SLAs, and tools like Anomalo or Monte Carlo.
• Experience operating Airflow at scale and working with managed ingestion like Fivetran.
• Strong SQL, and good instincts for how to model data so analysts and data scientists can actually use it.
• Solid Python plus at least one of Kotlin, Java, Scala, or Go, along with experience shipping infrastructure on AWS with Terraform.
• A working understanding of data governance: access control, PII, retention and deletion, lineage, and audit.
• A track record of leading cross-team data initiatives and migrations, and of mentoring senior engineers.
• You can explain a technical tradeoff to leadership and new grads alike, and drive consensus.
• You take ownership of things that are broken or unowned, and you're willing to be on call for the systems you build.

What's on offer

Working at Faire offers competitive rewards and an environment built to help you scale:

• Competitive pay ranging from $216,000 to $297,000 per year in Canada.
• Eligibility for equity and comprehensive benefits designed to support your life inside and outside of work.
• The opportunity to move fast and own meaningful problems serving customers around the globe.
• Access to enterprise AI tools and resources to help you work smarter.
• An intentional environment focused on belonging and equal access to opportunities, growth, and success.