Senior Engineering Leader - Discovery Experience

About the Role:

The Discovery Experience team at Faire sits at the intersection of search, evaluate, and personalization — shaping how retailers find the products they love. Our mission is to build the most intuitive, intelligent, and delightful discovery experience in wholesale: one that feels less like a search engine and more like a trusted merchant with an encyclopedic knowledge of what's in stock and what will sell.

We're looking for an experienced leader to lead our Discovery Experience team. In this role, you will partner closely with product, design, and machine learning teams to craft search and discovery experiences that are fast, relevant, and deeply personalized. You bring a strong point of view on what great search UX looks like, you believe AI is transforming how people find things, and you're excited to build at that frontier.

You will own a critical part of the discovery experience, spanning search, recommendations, and Gen-AI experience that drives a meaningful share of marketplace engagement, conversion, and retailer success. This role sits at the center of some of Faire’s most important product and technical challenges: building high-scale, low-latency systems that help retailers navigate millions of products with speed, relevance, and trust, while pushing the frontier of AI-powered discovery.

As a leader in Discovery, you will shape not only team execution, but also the longer-term technical and organizational direction of discovery at Faire — influencing strategy across product engineering, ML, and infrastructure. You’ll help unify retrieval, ranking, personalization, and UX into a cohesive system, while enabling fast experimentation and measurable business impact.

What You'll Do:

• Define and execute the technical vision for Faire's discovery experience, spanning search UX, recommendations, and AI-powered discovery, ensuring every retailer can effortlessly find what they're looking for.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of engineers focused on the retailer-facing discovery surface, fostering a culture of craft, ownership, and continuous learning.
• Drive the integration of Algo and AI/LLM-powered capabilities into the discovery experience — from natural language search to intelligent query understanding and personalized results.
• Partner with product and design to raise the bar on search UX, ensuring the experience is intuitive, accessible, and optimized for how retailers actually shop.
• Enable rapid experimentation across discovery surfaces, working closely with ML teams to iterate on ranking, surfacing, and personalization.
• Champion observability and quality across the discovery stack, building the right instrumentation to understand user behavior and proactively improve the experience.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration across relevance, ML, infrastructure, and product engineering to deliver cohesive, end-to-end discovery improvements.
• Attract, hire, and retain top engineering talent, fostering an inclusive and psychologically safe team culture that encourages bold ideas and diverse perspectives.
• Work closely with leadership to align discovery investments with Faire's growth strategy and marketplace priorities.

You Might Thrive in this Role If You:

• Have experience building search or discovery products end-to-end, with a strong appreciation for the interplay between UX, relevance, and infrastructure.
• Are genuinely excited about AI-powered discovery — you've worked with LLMs, semantic search, or conversational interfaces and believe they're reshaping how people find things.
• Have a user-first mindset: you think deeply about search UX, query understanding, and how small UI decisions drive big differences in retailer satisfaction and conversion.
• Have a strong background in building and shipping consumer or B2B product features at scale, with experience collaborating closely with product and design.
• Have led high-performing engineering teams, with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
• Enjoy working across disciplines — with relevance engineers, ML practitioners, product managers, and designers — to deliver experiences that are greater than the sum of their parts.
• Are comfortable navigating ambiguity and bringing clarity and structure to complex, multi-team problems.
• Believe in a culture of radical candor and psychological safety, and lead by example in encouraging diverse viewpoints and open discussion.

Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience in engineering roles, with at least 3+ years in engineering leadership positions.
• Demonstrated experience working on search, discovery, recommendations, or related product domains — either on the UX/product side or the relevance/infrastructure side (ideally both).
• Hands-on familiarity with AI and ML-powered product development, including experience integrating or shipping LLM-based features, semantic search, or personalization systems.
• Strong product sensibility and communication skills, with the ability to translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical direction.
• Experience driving cross-functional initiatives and aligning engineering roadmaps with product and business priorities.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Salary range:

San Francisco: The salary range for this role is $231,000 - $318,000 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.