Staff Backend Engineer - Ads Formats

The Ads Supply pod grows Faire's Ads business by expanding where, how, and in what format ads show up. Almost all of Faire's ads today are promoted product listings, and we'll unlock top-of-market opportunities for our advertisers with premium creative formats.

As a technical leader, you'll own building the high-scale, low-latency systems that serve and render premium formats like video and brand creative across every surface and device. Working hands-on across the full stack and co-shaping the experience with Product and Design, you'll unify creative serving, formats, and rendering into one cohesive system, partnering closely with Ads Delivery and Ads Bidding and enabling fast, measurable experimentation. You'll also set the technical direction for ad formats at Faire and shape the roadmap for what we build next.

• →Own the technical vision: Define the end-to-end architecture for our next-generation ad formats, including a unified serving layer that keeps the experience fast, scalable, and reliable across surfaces and devices.
• →Build the systems behind every format: Design highly automated systems for ad format serving, optimization, and A/B testing that maximize business outcomes.
• →Lay the foundations for future formats: Build the framework-level solutions that make new formats faster to ship and deepen how well we understand our users.
• →Invent what comes next: Conceptualize, prototype, and run experiments on new ad format ideas, drawing on market trends, user behavior, and advertiser needs to find the opportunities with real business impact.
• →Drive cross-functional impact: Operate as a product builder who brings customer understanding to the work, partnering closely with Product, Design, Data Science, and other engineering teams to deliver cohesive, high-impact solutions.
• →Raise the engineering bar: Advocate for and apply best practices across availability, scalability, operational excellence, and cost management.
• →Mentor and lead: Guide and upskill other engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and continuous learning.

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years as a technical leader driving complex, cross-team projects.
• Deep expertise in building and scaling ad formats or similar user-facing content delivery systems.
• Excellent programming and system design skills, with a proven track record of leading and operating highly available, high-performance, low-latency backend systems at scale.
• AI-native, using modern AI tooling as a core part of how you deliver impact and embedding AI best practices into your daily workflow.
• A product builder who understands customers deeply, helps shape what gets built, and turns ambiguous business problems into clear product and technical direction.
• Strong collaboration, mentorship, and leadership: a compelling vision, clear communication, and the ability to drive concurrent projects and influence strategy with a collaborative leadership style.

• Experience with cross-platform development.
• Prior experience building or operating creative serving infrastructure for digital advertising, especially for new and rich ad formats (e.g., video or interactive creative).
• Experience with machine learning and gen-AI in advertising, such as ranking, retrieval, and optimization.

• Backend: Kotlin, Java 16, Hibernate, Guice, Jersey
• Search and data: Elasticsearch, FAISS, Redis, DynamoDB
• Communication: Protocol Buffers, HTTP, JSON
• Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Buildkite, Datadog

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.

• 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)

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)