People Matter

Senior Engineering Manager, Platform Infrastructure

Faire

Faire

Software Engineering, Other Engineering
Kitchener, ON, Canada · Waterloo, ON, Canada
Posted on Nov 21, 2024

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:

Our Engineering organization owns the software that makes our marketplace work. Our Platform group enables product engineering teams to develop software with unmatched speed and quality. We care about good engineering practices, excellent developer experience, security, testability, ease of maintenance, and scaling to serve millions of users.

Our Platform Reliability Engineering team builds and operates the core infrastructure used by all Faire services. It drives best practices to achieve excellent availability and performance. The work can be categorized into two main themes:

  • Infrastructure and Resiliency: Enabling developers to ship and operate services on a stable, available, and fault-tolerant foundation, while minimizing developer friction and enabling high development velocity.
  • Performance and Insights: Maximizing resource efficiency and providing developers with capabilities to understand and continuously improve their services, to deliver excellent user experiences.

Select areas and capabilities owned by the team:

  • Resiliency at the application and infrastructure layers (rate-limiting, circuit breakers, load shedding)
  • Fault injection
  • Patterns and practices for SLOs
  • Database stability & performance
  • Cost <> performance optimization
  • Observability, telemetry, instrumentation, monitoring
  • Infrastructure lifecycle management

The team owns relationships with key infrastructure vendors: public cloud, observability, alerting, edge networking, etc.

We’re looking for: An experienced technical Engineering Manager with substantial architecture and infrastructure experience to lead a portion of the team, covering one of the two main themes mentioned above. The focus is leading highly talented engineers, enabling them to develop and deliver on a technical roadmap and engage with teams organization-wide.

What You’ll Do:

  • Define and execute a technology strategy that scales with our growth, and contributes to our architectural guidance
  • Lead the team in strategy development, planning and prioritization, balancing urgent and near-term needs with long-term goals
  • Influence the Engineering organization to adopt patterns and practices developed by the team
  • Handle vendor relationships, contract negotiations and renewal in the technology infrastructure space
  • Manage operational on-call rotation and associated concerns
  • Provide career guidance and mentorship to Engineers

Qualifications:

  • A bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Software Engineering or equivalent industry experience.
  • A strong technical background in scalable distributed systems, diagnosing, mitigating, and permanently addressing production issues at scale
  • Experience leading engineers working on technology challenges in multiple domains: networking, public cloud infrastructure, caching and storage, scaling high-volume systems, observability/telemetry, root cause analysis, capacity vs. cost tradeoffs, etc.
  • A love for technology, and an insatiable curiosity for new tools to tackle real problems.
  • A track record of leading teams to higher levels of contribution.
  • Capable and willing to write software for a couple of months as part of your onboarding.
  • Experience setting up and running on-call rotations
  • Strong communication skills; ability to bring disparate groups of people to a shared understanding

Select technologies we use and teach: AWS, Kubernetes, Elasticsearch, Redis, Dynamo, Datadog, Cloudflare, PagerDuty, Kotlin

Salary Range:

Canada: the pay range for this role is $184,000 - $230,000 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.

This role will be in-office on a hybrid schedule - Faire employees will be expected to go into the office 2 days per week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, effective the week of January 13, 2025. Additionally, in-office roles will have the flexibility to work remotely up to 4 weeks per year.

Applications for this position will be accepted for a minimum of 30 days from the posting date.

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. To request reasonable accommodation, please fill out our Accommodation Request Form (https://bit.ly/faire-form)