Senior Growth Platform Engineer

About Faire

Faire is an online wholesale marketplace built on the belief that the future is local — independent retailers around the globe are doing more revenue than Walmart and Amazon combined, but individually, they are small compared to these massive entities. 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 that small businesses everywhere can compete with these big box and e-commerce giants.

By supporting the growth of independent businesses, Faire is driving positive economic impact in local communities, globally. 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 this role:

At Faire we have a business unit focused on Retailer Growth that oversees core growth strategies from top of funnel, to onboarding, to helping Retailers get up and running to be successful on Faire. 

As our Growth organization scales, the complexity of experimentation, segmentation, targeting, personalization, and lifecycle orchestration increases dramatically. We are investing in platform capabilities that empower multiple product teams to move faster and run higher-quality experiments safely at scale.

We are looking for a Senior Growth Platform Engineer to design and build the foundational systems that power growth across Faire. We are looking for someone who thinks in terms of reusable capabilities, scalable architecture, and long-term leverage. This role focuses on backend systems that enable experimentation, targeting, incentives, lifecycle triggers, and growth automation across the retailer journey.

What you’ll do:

• Architect and build scalable backend systems that power experimentation, segmentation, and targeting.
• Design growth infrastructure that enables product teams to ship experiments safely and independently.
• Build APIs and services that support personalization, incentives, lifecycle triggers, and growth workflows.
• Partner with Data Science and Analytics to ensure accurate experiment assignment, event tracking, and metric integrity.
• Improve experimentation velocity by reducing friction in tooling, deployment, and analysis.
• Ensure systems are reliable, observable, secure, and capable of operating at marketplace scale.
• Establish best practices for experimentation guardrails, traffic allocation, and statistical integrity.
• Influence technical direction across the Growth organization through platform design and architectural leadership

We’re excited about you because you:

• Have 5+ years of backend software engineering experience.
• Have strong experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale.
• Have built or significantly contributed to experimentation platforms, or growth infrastructure.
• Are fluent in backend technologies such as Kotlin, Java, or similar JVM-based systems.
• Have deep experience designing APIs and working with relational databases (e.g., MySQL, CockroachDB).
• Understand event-driven architectures, data pipelines, and instrumentation best practices.
• Care about system reliability, observability, and performance.
• Think in terms of leverage, building systems that empower many teams rather than solving one-off problems.
• Can translate ambiguous growth requirements into robust, scalable technical solutions.
• Have strong product instincts and understand how platform decisions impact business outcomes.

Bonus / Nice to haves:

• Experience in marketplace, e-commerce, or two-sided platform environments.
• Familiarity with statistical experimentation concepts (power, bias, sample sizing).
• Experience integrating with marketing automation, CRM, or lifecycle systems.
• Exposure to real-time personalization or recommendation systems.

Technologies we use & teach:

Experience with similar technologies is welcome - you don’t need experience with our exact stack.

• Backend: Kotlin, Java, Guice, Jersey, Hibernate
• Datastores: MySQL, CockroachDB
• Infrastructure & Cloud: AWS (EC2, S3, RDS), Docker
• APIs & Data: HTTP, REST, JSON, Protocol Buffers
• Experimentation & Growth: Feature flagging systems, A/B testing frameworks, traffic ramping tools

Salary range:

Canada: the pay range for this role is $156,000 - $214,500 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.

Hybrid Faire employees currently go into the office 3 days per week on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and a third flex day of their choosing (Monday, Wednesday, or Friday). Additionally, hybrid in-office roles will have the flexibility to work remotely up to 4 weeks per year. Specific Workplace and Information Technology positions may require onsite attendance 5 days per week as will be indicated in the job posting. 

Why you’ll love working at Faire

• We are entrepreneurs: Faire is being built for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs. We believe entrepreneurship is a calling and our mission is to empower entrepreneurs to chase their dreams. Every member of our team is taking part in the founding process.
• We are using technology and data to level the playing field: We are leveraging the power of product innovation and machine learning to connect brands and boutiques from all over the world, building a growing community of more than 350,000 small business owners.
• We build products our customers love: Everything we do is ultimately in the service of helping our customers grow their business because our goal is to grow the pie - not steal a piece from it. Running a small business is hard work, but using Faire makes it easy.
• We are curious and resourceful: Inquisitive by default, we explore every possibility, test every assumption, and develop creative solutions to the challenges at hand. We lead with curiosity and data in our decision making, and reason from a first principles mentality.

Faire was founded in 2017 by a team of early product and engineering leads from Square. We’re backed by some of the top investors in retail and tech including: Y Combinator, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Forerunner Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, and DST Global. We have headquarters in San Francisco and Kitchener-Waterloo, and a global employee presence across offices in Toronto, London, and New York. To learn more about Faire and our customers, you can read more on our blog.

Faire provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.

Faire is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment, its services, programs, and activities. Accommodations are available throughout the recruitment process and applicants with a disability may request to be accommodated throughout the recruitment process. We will work with all applicants to accommodate their individual accessibility needs.  To request reasonable accommodation, please fill out our Accommodation Request Form (https://bit.ly/faire-form))

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