Senior Applied ML/AI Scientist - Search

About FaireFaire 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 the roleSearch is how retailers do their jobs on Faire. Wholesale queries and retailer expectations look different from consumer e-commerce and the right product depends on the store's category, price point, and aesthetic. When we get it wrong, it costs real money.The Search algorithms team owns everything between the click on the search bar and the final ranker: typeahead and empty-state suggestions, query understanding, retrieval across five-plus independent sources, relevance modeling, and result-page surfaces like carousels and refinements. Within our scope, scientists own components outright: when you own query understanding here, you own the models, the roadmap, and the metrics.You'll work across the full modern search stack: transformer-based embedding retrieval serving live traffic, LLMs powering query understanding and query rewriting, fine-tuned vision-language models scoring relevance, and graph-based retrieval — with generative retrieval and semantic IDs on the horizon.What you'll doContribute to the next-generation Search engine, integrating LLMs, query understanding, dense vector retrieval, deep personalization embeddings, multi-stage ranking, and reinforcement learning to serve personalized product feeds with