Staff Back End Engineer (Applications)

About Forma.ai:

Forma.ai is a Series B startup that's revolutionizing how sales compensation is designed, managed and optimized. We handle billions in annual managed commissions for market leaders like Edmentum, Stryker, and Autodesk.

Our growth has been fuelled by our passion for fundamentally changing and shaping how companies use sales intelligence to drive business strategy.

We’re welcoming equally driven individuals who are excited about creating something big!

Senior Staff Backend Engineer

About the Team

We build enterprise software that helps organizations optimize sales performance, enabling go-to-market agility. Our engineering organization includes multiple product application teams responsible for delivering core customer-facing capabilities. We are seeking a Senior Staff Backend Engineer to join our application teams and help set technical direction across multiple domains within engineering. You'll work alongside staff, senior, and early-career engineers, and partner closely with engineering leadership to define, evolve, and scale the systems that power enterprise-grade product workflows. This is an opportunity to own complex, multi-domain technical problems and shape product direction beyond a single team. We are low on meetings, high on accountability. Most of the teams are in the EST time zone, but we have a few located in AST, PST, and Central as well.

What you'll be doing

You will play a pivotal role in shaping the technical direction of our application stack across multiple domains. You will lead development efforts for our most complex initiatives, the kind that span two or more teams or product areas, and serve as a technical benchmark for system design, code quality, and long-term maintainability. You'll operate at the intersection of data modelling, business logic, and enterprise-scale reliability, and your work will often set standards that neighboring teams adopt. This remains a hands-on role; you personally ship the hardest work in your domain rather than only setting direction for others.

As a Senior Staff Engineer, you are expected to operate with a very high degree of ownership, trust, and independent judgment. This includes proactively identifying architectural risks that cross team boundaries, surfacing edge cases or constraints others may not see, and advocating improvements that strengthen the long-term integrity of the systems you own. Where the opportunity is there, and especially when you're excelling in the role, your influence can extend across the broader org, but the core expectation is deep ownership of complex domains spanning multiple teams. We value engineers who bring forward thoughtful, sometimes contrarian perspectives, even when they challenge deeply held assumptions, and who help neighboring teams see around corners.

You will:

• Design and evolve backend services and architectural patterns that power product workflows across two or more teams or domains.

• Architect data models representing hierarchical & graph structures, relationships, and large-scale enterprise datasets, setting standards that other teams in adjacent domains build on.

• Build deterministic, reliable systems that allow customers to reason clearly about their data.

• Drive architectural decisions that span multiple domains, balancing extensibility, performance, and operational simplicity.

• Improve observability, testing strategy, and production reliability across the systems and domains you own.

• Partner closely with Product and Engineering leadership to translate ambiguous, high-stakes business requirements into clean, scalable designs.

• Mentor engineers across levels, including other staff-level engineers, and help raise the bar for backend engineering within your domains and beyond.

• Use and champion the use of AI tooling to improve implementation velocity while thoughtfully investing in technical and product specifications.

What We're Looking for:

• Extensive experience designing and building complex backend systems in production environments at scale.

• Strong product judgment. You learn the customer's domain and workflow deeply enough to shape what gets built alongside Product, catch customer-experience problems during design rather than after ship, and push back on requirements when the proposed solution doesn't fit how customers actually work.

• A track record of leading architectural direction across multiple teams or domains, not just within a single team.

• Demonstrated ability to surface unarticulated risks, propose alternative approaches, and advocate for architectural improvements with sound technical reasoning, including the ability to influence decisions outside your immediate team.

• Deep expertise in at least one production-grade backend language (e.g., Python, Java, Kotlin, Go, C#, etc.).

• Strong foundation in relational schema design, data modelling, and SQL.

• Significant experience working with hierarchical, graph-like, or relationship-heavy data structures.

• Familiarity with graph databases or graph-based modelling concepts is a strong plus.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to influence stakeholders and align multiple teams around a technical vision.

• A track record of meaningfully improving scalability, reliability, and observability in distributed or data-intensive systems spanning more than one domain.

• A strong desire to own architecture and product direction across complex, multi-team domains, not just implement tickets or lead a single team's roadmap.

• Experience mentoring senior and staff-level engineers and raising the technical bar across the teams you work with.

• Thrive in a collaborative, detail-oriented environment across Engineering, Product, and Analytics.

Nice to have:

• Experience building SaaS products serving mid-market or enterprise customers.

• Experience building rule-driven systems, validation workflows, or approval/governance platforms.

• Familiarity with AWS-based infrastructure and Kubernetes.

• Exposure to Sales Performance Management (SPM), RevOps, Incentive Compensation (ICM), or related domains.

Technologies we use

Frontend: JavaScript, React, TypeScript

Backend: Java/Springboot, Django, Postgres

Infrastructure: AWS, Docker

What success looks like: 30/60/90 days

First 30 days

You'll focus on building deep context across the product domain, backend architecture, and the data models that power Forma's platform, while quickly establishing yourself as a resource other teams can rely on.

By the end of your first 30 days, you will have:

• Developed a strong understanding of Forma.ai's product, customers, and sales performance domain.

• Built a clear mental model of the backend architecture, core services, and data flows across the system.

• Gained familiarity with key data models, including hierarchical structures, relationships, and workflow-driven entities.

• Set up your development environment and become comfortable navigating the codebase, services, and infrastructure.

• Learned the team's engineering practices around testing, observability, deployment, and reliability.

• Built relationships with engineering, product, and analytics partners, as well as engineering leadership.

• Contributed to technical discussions within your domains and with adjacent teams, asking thoughtful questions and identifying early areas of complexity or risk.

• Shipped small but meaningful improvements or fixes to build familiarity with the system.

• Started identifying opportunities to improve data modeling, system clarity, or backend reliability across the domains you touch.

First 60 days

You'll begin owning meaningful backend systems that span more than one domain and influencing technical decisions beyond your immediate team.

By the end of your first 60 days, you will have:

• Taken ownership of a significant backend component, service, or workflow with impact across two or more teams.

• Designed and delivered well-structured, maintainable backend code aligned with system standards.

• Partnered closely with Product and Engineering leadership to translate complex, ambiguous business requirements into scalable backend designs.

• Demonstrated strong judgment in data modeling, especially around relationships, hierarchy, and workflow representation.

• Identified and surfaced architectural risks, edge cases, or inconsistencies spanning multiple systems or teams.

• Proposed and, where appropriate, implemented improvements to backend architecture, data models, or service boundaries across the domains you own.

• Contributed to improvements in observability, testing, and production reliability for those domains.

• Participated actively in code reviews and technical design discussions, raising the bar for quality and clarity with the teams you partner with.

• Begun mentoring other engineers, including senior and staff engineers, on the systems and domains you know best.

• Built enough system context to make informed tradeoffs between performance, extensibility, and simplicity at a multi-domain scale.

First 90 days

You'll be operating as a trusted technical leader for the complex, multi-team domains you own.

By the end of your first 90 days, you will have:

• Led the design and delivery of a complex backend initiative spanning multiple services, domains, or teams.

• Introduced or significantly improved core data models, system architecture, or workflow handling within your domains.

• Demonstrated the ability to anticipate and mitigate long-term architectural risks across the areas you own.

• Influenced technical direction across two or more teams through clear, well-reasoned proposals and design decisions.

• Meaningfully improved the reliability, observability, or scalability of critical backend systems within your domains.

• Established strong working relationships across Engineering, Product, Analytics, and leadership.

• Elevated engineering standards through mentorship, design reviews, and technical guidance, with reach extending to adjacent teams and, where it makes sense, the broader org.

• Helped the teams you work with better reason about complex, data-intensive workflows through clearer system design.

• Identified and began executing longer-term backend investments that improve system integrity and developer velocity within your domains.

• Demonstrated clear, measurable impact on both system quality and your teams' ability to deliver confidently at scale.

Additional Job Info:

This position is for an existing vacancy

What you can expect from us

Meaningful compensation. In addition to your base salary, you’ll join our employee stock ownership plan to further recognize your contributions to Forma.ai’s success.

Healthcare coverage. We have a full benefits package that includes medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance, and a paid parental leave program.

Learning and development. Access the resources you want to help you grow in your role by utilizing our $750 yearly training stipend.

Growth. You’ll have a huge opportunity to build a career for yourself and gain the type of experience you’re looking for, whether that’s as an individual contributor or as a people leader.

Our Values:

• Work well, together. We’re real. We have kids and pets. Mortgages and student loans. We’re in this together, so no matter how brilliant any one of us is, we always play nice with one another – no exceptions.
• Be precise. Be relentless. We believe complacency breeds failure, so we set new goals as quickly as we achieve them. We persist in the face of adversity, learn from our mistakes, and push each other to continuously improve. The status-quo is kryptonite.
• Love our tech. Love our customers. Our platform solves a very complex problem in a currently underserved market. While everyone at Forma isn’t customer-facing, we’re all customer-focused. Maybe even slightly customer-obsessed. ­

Use of AI for Recruitment

Currently, Forma.ai does not use artificial intelligence as part of our recruitment process, specifically but not limited to the screening, filtering and shortlisting of applicants.

Our commitment to you:

Forma is a proud equal opportunity employer that is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment. Every effort to accommodate candidates for accessibility will be made upon request. Information received related to accommodations will be addressed confidentially. We know that applying to a new role takes a lot of effort. You're encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. There are many paths to a successful career and we’re looking forward to reading yours.

We thank all candidates for their interest however only qualified applicants will be shortlisted.