Senior Applied AI​/ML Scientist - Search Ads

About Faire

Faire is an online wholesale marketplace built on the belief that the future is local — independent retailers around the globe are doing more revenue than Walmart and Amazon combined, but individually, they are small compared to these massive entities. 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 that small businesses everywhere can compete with these big box and e-commerce giants.

By supporting the growth of independent businesses, Faire is driving positive economic impact in local communities, globally. 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.

The Ads Data team is building the next generation of advertising products for the wholesale industry. As a key member of this team, you’ll help drive the ML algorithm strategy and system design behind one of the most critical levers for customer value and company growth—Search Ads. You’ll lead the advancement of real-time systems that decide which ads to show for a query, where to place them, and how to optimize for relevance, marketplace health, and advertiser outcomes.

This role mirrors many of the technical expectations of Faire’s organic Search roles (modern NLP/LLMs, query understanding, real-time ranking), while operating in an ads environment with auctions, budgets, and pacing constraints.

You’ll operate at the forefront of algorithms—combining large language models, natural language processing, query understanding, deep learning, and structured behavioral data to deliver highly relevant sponsored results for any given query.

• Own and evolve the Search Ads relevance stack—spanning query understanding, targeting, candidate generation, multi-stage ranking, and calibration—while meeting stringent latency and reliability goals.
• Design and product ionize ML models that improve sponsored-result relevance and personalization, using a blend of unstructured signals (text/images where applicable), LLM-based representations, and structured marketplace features.
• Partner closely with engineering and product to connect relevance improvements to ads marketplace outcomes (e.g., conversion, long-term retailer experience, advertiser ROI), using rigorous offline evaluation and online experiments.
• As an early member of the Ads Data team, help define its roadmap and technical culture, leveraging deep product intuition to shape what ads at Faire should be—not just how they’re built.
• Work in a fast-paced, collaborative environment with team members who’ve shipped ML at top tech companies (e.g. Uber, Airbnb, Meta, Amazon, Pinterest).

• 4+ years of experience building and shipping ML systems in production, with meaningful experience in search, recommendation, or ads ranking/retrieval.
• Hands-on experience with modern deep learning tooling (e.g., PyTorch) and familiarity with vector search / embedding-based retrieval concepts (e.g., Faiss, ScaNN, Pinecone).
• A strong track record of product ionizing models that blend LLMs (e.g., BERT / GPT-class) with structured features to drive relevance and personalization.
• Product-focused mindset and a bias toward execution—moving quickly from research to measurable user and business impact.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work with others in a closely collaborative team environment

• Highly recommended:
  Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, or related STEM fields
• Ability to quickly implement state of the art algorithms from an academic paper

San Francisco: the pay range for this role is $192,000 to $264,000 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…