IT Operations Automation Engineer

IT Operations Automation Engineer

San Francisco, CA

Faire 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 This Role

Faire is looking for an IT Operations Automation Engineer to join our IT Operations team in San Francisco. We're building IT Support as a product — instrumented, measurable, and continuously improved through automation rather than headcount. This role is the engine of that strategy.

You'll spend the majority of your time building automations, crafting code, and deploying AI tooling that eliminates entire categories of tickets rather than closing them one by one. You'll stay close to the support surface through targeted, high-impact escalations — the fastest way to spot what's worth automating is to feel the pain yourself — but the deliverable is leverage, not ticket throughput.

This role is roughly 70% building and 30% high-impact escalations, root cause work, and stakeholder partnership. If you've ever closed a ticket and thought "this should never have been a ticket," this is the job for you.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and ship automations (Python, Jira/Slack workflows, scripting) that remove recurring work from the IT team's plate and improve the employee experience.
• Treat IT Support as a product: instrument ticket data, identify the top drivers, and ship upstream fixes — playbooks, self-service, automation, or system changes.
• Deploy modern AI tooling (agents, LLM-powered triage, auto-resolution, knowledge retrieval) to raise deflection rates and service quality.
• Own an automation roadmap: prioritize the highest-leverage opportunities, ship measurable improvements, and report on impact.
• Act as a global escalation point for complex, high-impact issues — and use those escalations as the input signal for what to automate next.
• Get to the bottom of issues through real root cause analysis, not surface-level fixes.
• Partner with IT Engineering on tooling, reliability, and platform improvements, and contribute feedback that makes our systems more supportable by design.
• Build the documentation, self-service guides, and internal tools that let the rest of the IT team — and our employees — solve more on their own.

Qualifications

• 3+ years in IT, technical operations, or a similar role, with a meaningful portion of that time spent building rather than only supporting.
• Demonstrated track record of writing code (Python preferred) that replaced a manual process or eliminated a category of tickets.
• Comfortable working with APIs, webhooks, and integrating SaaS platforms (Jira, Slack, Google Workspace, Okta, etc.).
• Product-minded approach to support: you instrument before you optimize, and you think in terms of categories of problems rather than individual tickets.
• Strong diagnostic and troubleshooting skills across macOS, SaaS, networking, and A/V (Zoom Rooms) — enough to handle the escalations that feed your automation roadmap.
• Experience with enterprise IT platforms such as Fleet, Okta, Atlassian, Google Workspace, and Slack.
• Curiosity about and experience with AI tooling applied to internal operations — bonus points if you've shipped something using an LLM in a workflow.
• Excellent communication; able to clearly convey technical decisions and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ownership mindset, bias toward long-term solutions over quick fixes.

Physical And Travel Requirements

• Comfortable lifting up to 20kg.
• Ability to travel within North America and Europe as needed, and to adjust work hours occasionally to support international collaboration.

Salary Range

San Francisco, CA: the pay range for this role is $100,000 to $137,000 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.

Hybrid Faire employees currently go into the office 3 days per week on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and a third flex day of their choosing (Monday, Wednesday, or Friday). Additionally, hybrid in-office roles will have the flexibility to work remotely up to 4 weeks per year. Specific Workplace and Information Technology positions may require onsite attendance 5 days per week as will be indicated in the job posting.

Why You'll Love Working At Faire

• 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.

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.