An Engineering Manager at Faire is a pivotal leadership role responsible for driving the technical vision, execution, and people development within a fast-growing, high-scale global marketplace. Faire connects hundreds of thousands of independent retailers with emerging and established brands, meaning your work directly impacts the livelihoods of small business owners worldwide. As an engineering leader, you will be tasked with building and scaling systems that handle complex wholesale dynamics, search and recommendation algorithms, international expansion, and sophisticated financial tools like net-60 payment terms.

The role requires a delicate balance of deep technical expertise and strong organizational leadership. You will not merely manage tasks; you will shape the engineering culture, mentor high-performing engineers, and collaborate closely with product management, design, and data science to deliver high-impact features. Whether you are leading a team focused on search discovery, logistics, checkout, or brand onboarding, your ultimate goal is to build a reliable, secure, and delightful experience that levels the playing field for independent businesses.

This position is both challenging and deeply rewarding, demanding leaders who can thrive in a fast-paced, highly collaborative environment. To succeed, you must be comfortable navigating ambiguity, making rapid trade-offs between speed and system longevity, and championing a culture of empathy, ownership, and continuous learning.

The questions you will encounter during the Faire interview process are designed to evaluate your practical leadership experience, architectural depth, and alignment with the company's core values. While these questions represent common patterns observed in actual interviews, you should focus on understanding the underlying principles of what interviewers are testing rather than memorizing specific responses.

People Management & Leadership

This category explores your ability to build, mentor, and sustain high-performing engineering teams. Interviewers want to see how you handle human complexity and foster career growth.

• How do you manage a high-performing engineer who is showing signs of burnout or disengagement?
• Describe a time when you had to manage an underperforming engineer. What steps did you take, and what was the outcome?

Preparing for an Engineering Manager loop at Faire requires a holistic approach that covers technical depth, behavioral storytelling, and leadership philosophy. You should be prepared to discuss not only what you have built, but how you led the people who built it and why you made specific architectural choices.

Technical Leadership & Architecture – At Faire, engineering managers must remain technically sharp. You must demonstrate the ability to lead architectural discussions, identify systemic bottlenecks, and guide your team toward sound design decisions without micro-managing the codebase.

People Development & Coaching – You will be evaluated on your ability to grow talent. Be ready to share concrete frameworks you use for career pathing, performance management, and fostering psychological safety within your team.

Execution & Collaboration – Marketplace environments require tight alignment across functional boundaries. You must show how you partner with Product Managers, Designers, and business stakeholders to turn high-level strategy into concrete engineering execution.

Cultural Alignment – Faire values empathy, customer-centricity, and a focus on solving real-world problems for small businesses. Your answers should reflect a genuine passion for empowering others and a low-ego, collaborative working style.

The interview process for an Engineering Manager at Faire is designed to be comprehensive, transparent, and highly collaborative. Candidates typically report a structured journey that balances behavioral alignment with rigorous technical evaluation, often feeling more like a conversation among peers than a formal interrogation.

The process begins with an initial recruiter screening call to align on background, expectations, and role fit. This is followed by a deeper conversation with an engineering director to assess your high-level leadership style and experience. If you move forward, you will enter the panel loop, which consists of soft skills and behavioral interviews with other Senior Engineering Managers, a rigorous system design round with a Staff-level engineer, and a final conversation with an engineering executive or VP.

This visual timeline outlines the typical path a candidate takes from the initial touchpoint to the final decision. Use this overview to pace your preparation, ensuring you allocate sufficient time to practice both system design scenarios and behavioral storytelling before reaching the intensive panel stage.

To excel in the Faire interview loop, you must understand the specific competencies being evaluated in each core round. The interviewers look for balanced leaders who are as comfortable discussing database sharding as they are discussing career development frameworks.

System Design & Architecture

This round evaluates your ability to build robust, distributed systems that can handle the unique scale and complexity of Faire's wholesale marketplace. You will be paired with a senior or Staff-level engineer to design a solution to a complex, open-ended problem.

Be ready to go over:

• Scalability and Latency – How to handle sudden traffic spikes, cache invalidation strategies, and database read/write optimization.
• Data Modeling – Choosing between SQL and NoSQL databases for transactional versus analytical workloads in a marketplace context.
• API Design – Designing clean, extensible APIs that support both internal services and external integrations.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Event-driven architectures, message queue configurations (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ), and eventual consistency models in distributed transactions.

Example scenarios:

• Designing a high-volume shopping cart and checkout pipeline that locks inventory temporarily.
• Architecting a real-time analytics dashboard for brands to track their sales performance.

People Management & Leadership

This panel focuses on your ability to build healthy, motivated, and high-performing engineering teams. Interviewers want to understand your management philosophy and how you handle real-world team dynamics.

Be ready to go over:

• Performance Management – How you set expectations, deliver constructive feedback, and manage underperformance.
• Career Growth – Your approach to mentoring engineers, helping them reach the next level, and retaining top talent.
• Team Culture – Fostering psychological safety, collaboration, and a high-ownership mindset within your team.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Managing remote or geographically distributed teams, and structuring teams for optimal ownership and autonomy.

Example scenarios:

• Handling a situation where a senior engineer disagrees with your technical direction and actively pushes back.
• Helping a mid-level engineer overcome a plateau in their career progression.

Execution & Delivery

In this round, interviewers assess your ability to ship high-quality software predictably and efficiently. They want to see how you manage project lifecycles, handle dependencies, and collaborate cross-functionally.

Be ready to go over:

• Roadmap Planning – How you translate product requirements into technical milestones and estimate timelines accurately.
• Risk Mitigation – Identifying project risks early and communicating adjustments to stakeholders proactively.
• Technical Debt – How you prioritize refactoring and architectural health against immediate feature delivery.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Managing complex cross-team dependencies and driving alignment across multiple engineering organizations.

Example scenarios:

• Managing a critical launch when a key dependency team delays their deliverable.
• Prioritizing engineering resources when business priorities shift unexpectedly mid-quarter.