About the Position

Staff Data Infrastructure Engineer

Kitchener-Waterloo, ON; Toronto, ON

About Faire

Faire is a technology wholesale platform built on the belief that the future is local. Independent retailers around the globe collectively represent a multi-hundred-billion-dollar wholesale market that has historically been fragmented and offline. 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 businesses can grow and local communities can thrive.

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.

Responsibilities

Set the technical direction for how data moves from production systems into our analytical stores, and own the roadmap to get there over the next couple of years.
Build the CDC and streaming ingestion layer: CockroachDB changefeeds and MySQL binlogs into Kafka, then into Iceberg tables on S3. You'll be responsible for the hard details like ordering, deduplication, late data, schema changes, and backfills.
Implement data contracts and quality checks throughout our platform.
Put real ownership and SLAs on the datasets the business runs on, and wire quality checks into the platform with tools like Anomalo and Monte Carlo so we hear about broken data before a dashboard or a model does.
Run Airflow and Fivetran well, and have an opinion about what we should keep buying versus what we should build.
Own reliability for the platform: SLOs, on-call, incident reviews, and the follow-through so the same thing doesn't break twice.
Work with the senior engineers, data scientists, and analysts who depend on this platform, and lead the migration of existing pipelines onto the new one without breaking what they rely on.
Mentor the engineers around you. We want the team's data engineering practice to be better because you were here.

Requirements

Deep experience with change data capture and streaming ingestion from operational databases through Kafka. You know what goes wrong with ordering, duplicates, snapshots, and schema evolution because you've dealt with it.
Hands-on experience with lakehouse architectures on an open table format. Iceberg on S3 is what we use, so that's especially valuable. You should be comfortable talking about partitioning, compaction, catalogs, and copy-on-write versus merge-on-read.
Strong Spark skills, and experience running Databricks and Snowflake against shared storage.
Experience with data quality and observability in practice, including data contracts, SLAs, and tools like Anomalo or Monte Carlo.
Experience operating Airflow at scale and working with managed ingestion like Fivetran.
Strong SQL, and good instincts for how to model data so analysts and data scientists can actually use it.
Solid Python plus at least one of Kotlin, Java, Scala, or Go. Experience shipping infrastructure on AWS with Terraform.
A working understanding of data governance: access control, PII, retention and deletion, lineage, and audit.
A track record of leading cross-team data initiatives and migrations, and of mentoring senior engineers.
You can explain a technical tradeoff to a leadership team and to a new grad, and you can get people who disagree with each other to a decision.
You take ownership of things that are broken or unowned, and you're willing to be on call for the systems you build.
Experience in a marketplace, e-commerce, or other transaction-heavy business is a plus.

Technologies We Use and Teach

Programming Languages: Python, Kotlin, SQL
Message Queues: Kafka
Data Integration: Fivetran
Orchestration: Airflow
Storage: S3, Apache Iceberg
Data Warehouses: Snowflake, Databricks
Big Data Processing: Apache Spark
Cloud Providers: AWS
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform
Container Orchestration: Kubernetes
Databases: CockroachDB, MySQL, Scylla, DynamoDB

We Offer

Competitive Salary: CAD $216,000 to $297,000 per year
Equity and Benefits: Eligible for equity and comprehensive benefits
Hybrid Work Model: 3 days in-office (Tuesdays, Thursdays, and a flex day) and remote work flexibility up to 4 weeks per year
Career Growth: Opportunities to move fast, equipped with the latest tools, and supported by a best-in-class team
Inclusion and Belonging: Commitment to diversity, equal opportunity, and reasonable accommodations

About the Company

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)

For information about the type of personal data Faire collects from applicants, as well as your choices regarding the data collected about you, please visit Faire’s Privacy Notice (https://www.faire.com/privacy)

Staff Data Infrastructure Engineer

Job description