Senior Engineering Manager - Search Infrastructure

About this role

The Search Infrastructure team at Faire is the backbone of discovery, ensuring that every retailer has a fast, relevant, and reliable search experience. Our mission is to build the best in class search infrastructure that’s most scalable, high-performance, intellectual, and reliable search infrastructure that enables internal teams to rapidly iterate while providing best-in-class experiences for our users.

We are looking for an experienced Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Search Infrastructure team. In this role, you will work closely with search relevance, machine learning, and other infrastructure teams to scale our search platform, ensuring it remains performant and reliable as Faire continues to grow. Your focus will be on building a high-scale, low-latency, and reliable search stack while driving innovation in search and retrieval technologies..

What you’ll do 

• Define and execute the technical vision for Faire’s search infrastructure, ensuring it scales efficiently while maintaining high availability and performance—empowering the search algorithm to drive continuous innovation and transformative discovery experiences.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of experienced engineers working on search systems, fostering a culture of excellence and ownership.
• Optimize search performance and reliability, improving indexing, query execution, and real-time updates across large-scale datasets.
• Enable rapid experimentation for relevance and ranking teams by building flexible, scalable, and observable search infrastructure.
• Scale search infrastructure to handle growing traffic, global expansion, and increasing complexity in search retrieval and personalization.
• Improve search observability, building monitoring, alerting, and analytics to proactively detect and mitigate issues.
• Drive collaboration across engineering teams, ensuring seamless integration of ML-based ranking and retrieval models.
• Attract, hire, and retain top engineering talent, fostering an inclusive and diverse team culture that encourages innovation and psychological safety.
• Work closely with leadership to align search infrastructure investments with Faire’s business and engineering priorities.

You Might Thrive in this Role If You:

• Have deep expertise in search infrastructure, including indexing, query optimization, and distributed search architectures (e.g., Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Vespa, Lucene).
• Have scaled high-performance search systems to support rapid growth and increasing complexity.
• Have a strong background in distributed systems, data processing, caching strategies, and search observability.
• Are passionate about search reliability and performance, with experience designing high-availability systems that support mission-critical workloads.
• Have experience leading engineering teams, with a track record of building and growing high-performing, inclusive teams.
• Enjoy collaborating across disciplines, working closely with relevance engineers, ML teams, and product engineers to deliver end-to-end search improvements.
• Are comfortable navigating ambiguity and fast-changing conditions, bringing structure and clarity to complex problems.
• Have experience working with cloud-native architectures, leveraging AWS, Kubernetes, and modern search infrastructure tooling.
• Believe in a culture of radical candor and psychological safety, encouraging diverse viewpoints and open discussion.

Qualifications

• Expertise in search and retrieval technologies, focusing on scalability, fault tolerance, and search performance optimization.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of experience in engineering roles, with at least 5 years in leadership positions managing large-scale infrastructure or systems engineering teams.
• Proven experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, distributed search systems.
• Strong leadership and communication skills, with a track record of hiring and retaining top engineering talent.
• Experience in strategic planning and execution at a senior organizational level, aligning technical roadmaps with business priorities.

Salary range

San Francisco: the pay range for this role is $205,500 - $282,500 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.