Staff Software Engineer - Code Authoring
Faire · Waterloo, Canada +1 · 14d ago
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.
About this role
Our Engineering organization owns the software that makes our marketplace work. Our Engineering Platform group enables product engineering teams to build and operate software with unmatched speed and quality. The Code Authoring team owns the developer environment at Faire: the AI coding tools engineers use every day, remote development environments, and the sandboxes our end-to-end tests run in. We care about developer experience, the quality of code written by people and agents, the reliability of the tools engineers depend on, and the cost of running those tools.
The team focuses on the following areas and capabilities:
- AI code authoring harnesses
- Cloud environments for running agents on Claude and Cursor
- Validation of agent-written code: CI checks, pre-push checks, and automated review
- Agent memory and context management
- Model selection and LLM cost per pull request
- Remote development environments
- Sandboxes for end-to-end testing and agent runs
- Pre-push validation speed
- Tracing and cost visibility for every agent run
- Uptime and SLAs for developer tooling
- Developer cloud infrastructure cost across AWS and OCI
- Integrations with Linear and GitHub
The team also evaluates AI coding tools and owns our relationships with those vendors.
We're looking for: An experienced technical leader with substantial backend architecture and developer tooling experience to work alongside our team, develop and deliver on a technical roadmap for how code gets written and shipped at Faire, and engage with engineering teams organization-wide.
What you'll do
- Own the architecture of the systems that run coding agents against our codebase: the service that turns tickets into pull requests, the sandboxes and remote development environments it runs in, and the integrations with Linear, GitHub, Claude, and Cursor. You decide how these pieces fit together and hold the long-term design.
- Own the developer workflow end to end: how an engineer or an agent gets from a ticket to a merged, tested change. Know where it is slow or fragile, and change the tooling to fix it.
- Run these systems as production infrastructure, with clear ownership, monitoring, uptime targets, and accountability when they fail. Developers across Faire depend on them every day.
- Own what the platform costs to run: know what each agent run and each development environment costs, and keep that spend proportional to what it delivers.
- Set the standard for how teams build: design reviews, testing, operational readiness, and the quality bar for code written by people and by agents.
- Represent the pod to the rest of engineering: partner with other teams on the workflows they own, take part in planning and prioritization, and shape the roadmap around what the tooling can and cannot yet do.
- Mentor engineers on the pod and across the organization.
Qualifications
- Extensive experience designing, building, and running distributed backend systems in production, including finding and permanently fixing problems at scale.
- Experience owning the design of developer tools, CI/CD systems, or internal platforms that other engineering teams build on and hundreds of engineers use, and making design decisions that span several teams
- Hands-on experience building on large language models and coding agents: running agents, giving them tools, checking their output, and tracking what they do and what they cost. You use AI coding tools every day.
- Experience running services with uptime targets: defining SLAs, building monitoring and alerting, and owning incidents for systems other developers depend on.
- Good judgment on performance and cost tradeoffs, with a record of making a system cheaper to run without making it worse.
- A record of mentoring engineers and raising the level of the teams you have worked on, both on your immediate team and across the organization.
- Strong communication skills; ability to bring disparate groups of people to a shared understanding.
- A bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Software Engineering or equivalent industry experience.
Nice to have
- An advanced understanding of Kotlin; working knowledge of Python.
- Experience running workloads across more than one cloud provider.
Technologies we use & teach
(Experience in similar technologies is welcomed)
- Backend: Kotlin, Java, JUnit, Hibernate, Guice, Jersey, MySQL, CockroachDB, AWS
- Frontend: React, TypeScript/JavaScript
- Infrastructure & Data: Python, HTTP, JSON, Protocol Buffers, experimentation frameworks, analytics tooling
Salary range
Canada: the pay range for this role is $190,500 - $262,000 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.
Hybrid Faire employees currently go into the office 3 days per week on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and a third flex day of their choosing (Monday, Wednesday, or Friday). Additionally, hybrid in-office roles will have the flexibility to work remotely up to 4 weeks per year. Specific Workplace and Information Technology positions may require onsite attendance 5 days per week as will be indicated in the job posting.
Why you’ll love working at Faire
- Move fast: You'll own meaningful problems that serve customers around the globe with the agency to move fast and see your results clearly.
- Equipped to scale: We invest in what matters, including the latest enterprise AI tools, to help you work smarter and get more out of every day.
- Best in class: Our team is full of sharp, kind, and generous colleagues who care about their craft and about helping you grow in yours.
- Real rewards. Competitive pay, equity, and comprehensive benefits designed to support your life inside and outside of work.
- Belonging: We're intentional about building an environment where every Faire employee has equal access to opportunities, growth, and success.
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)
Privacy
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)