Full-Time
Staff Product Engineer
Search FX
Updated on 9/4/2026
Faire
1,001-5,000 employees
Wholesale marketplace linking brands and retailers
Compensation Overview
CA$190.5k - CA$262k/yr
Toronto, ON, Canada + 1 more
More locations: Kitchener-Waterloo, Waterloo Regional Municipality, ON, Canada
Hybrid
Three days in the office per week are required; employees may work remotely up to four weeks per year.
 Software Engineering (1) |
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- At least 7 years of professional software engineering experience.
- At least 3 years of experience as a technical leader driving complex, cross-team projects.
- Ability to translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical direction.
- Experience partnering with Data Science to deploy and leverage machine learning and generative AI systems in search experiences across ranking and retrieval.
- Knowledge of search and query processing, including traditional, semantic, and hybrid frameworks such as Elasticsearch and Lucene.
- Strong programming skills in Kotlin or Java, with experience in high-performance backend systems, Protocol Buffers, and MySQL.
- Ability to contribute to team strategy without supervision and influence the broader organizational roadmap.
- Define the end-to-end architecture for the search and discovery experience.
- Integrate large language model-powered capabilities, including natural language search and intelligent query understanding, into the product.
- Build high-scale, low-latency systems that navigate millions of products while meeting industry latency benchmarks.
- Partner with Data Science, Product, and Design to iterate on ranking models and user-experience components.
- Mentor and upskill the engineering team on technical expertise and decision-making.
- Lead the design of composable grids, intent-aware routing, and orchestration layers that unify retrieval and ranking.
- Use large language models to consolidate the query-understanding stack and improve accuracy for long-tail queries and edge cases.
- Increase retrieval candidates while maintaining stable search latency.
- Develop systems such as Search Missions that use offline pipelines and large language models to recover failed search sessions through expanded queries.
- Work with client engineers on server-driven user interfaces and React Server Components to improve performance and developer velocity for dynamic search layouts.
- Own the reliability and observability of the search funnel, including query-planner refactors and real-time retrieval monitoring.
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's Take
What believers are saying
- Faire reported 32% revenue growth in 2025 and 37% in late 2025.
- Faire reached 100,000 retailers and 50,000 brands across 30-plus countries by 2026.
- WCM's November 2025 tender offer gave employees liquidity and hinted at IPO readiness.
What critics are saying
- Faire's valuation reset to $5.2 billion in November 2025 signaled fragile market confidence.
- CEO Max Rhodes admitted 2022 growth shortcuts hurt retention and invited customer complaints.
- Wholesale platforms remain interchangeable; Shopify and Lightspeed can absorb discovery and ordering flows.
What makes Faire unique
- Faire's March 2026 Lightspeed integration extends its moat into retailer POS workflows.
- Faire now plugs into Shopify, Square, Clover, and Lightspeed Retail.
- Faire's net 60 terms and free opening-order returns reduce inventory risk.
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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
6 month growth
↓ -7%1 year growth
↓ -7%2 year growth
↓ -7%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.
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.
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.
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.
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.