Full-Time

Senior Applied ML/AI Scientist

Search

Faire

Faire

1,001-5,000 employees

Wholesale marketplace linking brands and retailers

Compensation Overview

CA$180k - CA$247.5k/yr

+ Equity

Toronto, ON, Canada + 1 more

More locations: Kitchener, ON, Canada

Hybrid

Hybrid role; in-office 3 days per week (Tuesdays, Thursdays, and a flex day).

Master's, PhD

Category
AI & Machine Learning (2)
,
Required Skills
LLM
Python
Machine Learning
A/B Testing
Reinforcement Learning

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Requirements
  • 3+ years building production ML systems, with meaningful time in search, recommendations, or another retrieval-and-relevance domain.
  • Shipped models that served real traffic, and owned the experiments that proved (or disproved) their value.
  • Depth somewhere in the modern retrieval stack — dual encoders and ANN serving, LLM-based query understanding, learning-to-rank fundamentals — and the ability to pick up the rest.
  • Strong Python and the engineering chops to take your own models to production.
  • Clear communication with scientists, engineers, and PMs: you make a crisp case for your ideas and update quickly when someone has a better one.
  • Excellent product judgment to connect customer and business context to technical decisions.
Responsibilities
  • Contribute to the next-generation Search engine, integrating LLMs, query understanding, dense vector retrieval, deep personalization embeddings, multi-stage ranking, and reinforcement learning to serve personalized product feeds with <100ms latency.
  • Own one or more search components end to end: problem framing, modeling, production code, experiment design, and the call on what to build next.
  • Ship to live traffic and let A/B tests, not opinions, settle what works.
  • Raise the team's bar through design reviews, pairing, and honest post-mortems
Desired Qualifications
  • Marketplace or e-commerce experience.
  • Publications, open-source work, or public writing on search and recommender systems.
  • MS or PhD in CS, Statistics, or a related field.

Faire is a B2B wholesale marketplace that connects independent brands with local retailers. Brands list products on the platform and retailers browse to discover unique items to stock in their stores. Faire earns revenue mainly through commissions on sales facilitated through the marketplace and offers services like inventory management and data analytics to help both sides optimize operations. The platform serves small to mid-sized businesses and focuses on strengthening local communities by enabling brands and retailers to grow together. Unlike general e-commerce platforms, Faire concentrates on wholesale relationships between brands and neighborhood retailers, providing tools that streamline ordering, payments, and analytics tailored to wholesale workflows.

Company Size

1,001-5,000

Company Stage

Series G

Total Funding

$1.5B

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2017

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Faire’s 2026 Lightspeed integration deepens distribution into 100,000+ brands and retailer workflows.
  • July 2026 Promoted Listings monetizes brand demand across Europe and expands high-margin advertising revenue.
  • Management says 2025 revenue grew 32% and break-even is approaching after 20% layoffs.

What critics are saying

  • Faire’s 2022 valuation crash to $5.2 billion exposed dependence on investor capital and sentiment.
  • Net 60 terms create credit losses and working-capital strain if retailer defaults spike in 2026.
  • Amazon Business, Shopify, and POS platforms can disintermediate Faire by bundling sourcing and checkout.

What makes Faire unique

  • Faire’s net 60 terms and free returns remove wholesale inventory risk for retailers.
  • Faire integrates with Shopify, Square, Clover, and Lightspeed Retail, embedding wholesale into checkout workflows.
  • Faire spans 100,000 retailers and 50,000 brands across 30+ countries, giving unmatched catalog breadth.

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Benefits

Time off

Parental leave

Daily mindfulness

Annual learning grant

Thoughtfully designed spaces

Fitness & wellbeing benefits

Mental health benefits

Charitable matching

Career planning

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

-7%

1 year growth

-7%

2 year growth

-7%
Business Wire
Jun 11th, 2026
Faire reaches 100,000 retailers across 30+ countries, with 26% of brands now selling cross-border

Faire, an online wholesale platform, has reached over 100,000 retailers and 50,000 brands across 30-plus countries five years after launching outside North America. The platform now spans Europe, Australia and New Zealand, with 26% of brands selling cross-border to an average of five countries each. Retailers on Faire are spending 20% more per order and 156% more annually since 2022, whilst brand orders have grown 123%. More than 120 international brands have exceeded $1 million in revenue on the platform. The UK remains Faire's largest European market with retailers across 15,000 towns, followed by France with 23,000 communes and Germany with 8,000 municipalities. The platform has supported nearly 5,000 international retailers through its Open with Faire programme since 2021, which provides new retailers with payment terms and reduced inventory risk.

PR Newswire
Mar 31st, 2026
Lightspeed integrates Faire's 100K+ brands into unified retail platform

Lightspeed has launched an integration with Faire, a B2B wholesale marketplace, giving retailers access to over 100,000 brands directly within Lightspeed Retail. The integration allows merchants to link their Faire account and automatically sync product information, including images, descriptions, variants and cost data, into Lightspeed Retail. The feature aims to reduce operational complexity for independent retailers sourcing new products. Merchants can place orders through Faire and choose to import selected products or automatically create inventory items when orders are placed, minimising manual data entry. The integration expands Lightspeed's wholesale buying ecosystem, which also includes NuORDER by Lightspeed. The feature is now available to eligible Lightspeed Retail merchants across the company's platform, which serves retail, golf and hospitality businesses in over 100 countries.

CNBC
Mar 19th, 2026
Faire CEO: We took 'shortcuts' to grow—alarm bells went off before we lost the company

Faire, an online wholesale marketplace connecting artisans with retailers, saw its valuation drop from $12.59 billion to $5.2 billion after CEO Max Rhodes discovered troubling metrics in April 2022. The company had grown to 1,200 employees whilst chasing "vanity metrics" and using investor capital as a shortcut to growth. Rhodes found dropping retention rates, customer complaints and users exploiting short-term incentives before leaving. Instead of spending more to reignite growth, Faire cut staff by 20% and eliminated discounts. The strategy worked: revenue grew 32% in 2025 over 2024, retention rates improved and the company expects to break even soon. Rhodes attributes the near-failure to hubris during rapid growth. "Success can be dangerous," he says, advising entrepreneurs to stay grounded in core values.

Associated Press
Mar 11th, 2026
Former Wayfair CFO joins Faire board as revenue hits $550M run rate

Faire, the wholesale technology platform, has appointed Michael Fleisher, former CFO of Wayfair, to its board of directors as chair of the audit committee. Fleisher led Wayfair through its IPO and helped scale the company from $1 billion to over $12 billion in annual revenue. He previously served as CFO of Warner Music Group and CEO of Gartner. The appointment comes as Faire reports strong growth, with revenue increasing 32% in 2025 and accelerating to 37% in the second half of the year, now annualising at approximately $550 million. The company has facilitated over 10 million connections between brands and retailers on its platform. Fleisher replaces Ellie Mertz and follows the recent appointment of Christopher Payne, former COO of DoorDash.

The Star Media Group
Nov 18th, 2025
Faire Employee Share Sale at $5.2B Valuation

Faire, an online marketplace, is allowing employees to sell shares at a $5.2 billion valuation, moving closer to an IPO. The $100 million tender offer is led by WCM Investment Management, with Baillie Gifford & Co and True North Fund participating. This marks the first public valuation since a $400 million funding round at $12.4 billion in 2021. Faire's CFO, Jason Lee, noted the company's strong cash position and potential for a future IPO.