[Hiring] Senior Staff Backend Engineer @Forma.ai

Role Description

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.

You will play a pivotal role in shaping the technical direction of our application stack across multiple domains:

• 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.
• 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.
• Champion the use of AI tooling to improve implementation velocity.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing and building complex backend systems in production environments at scale.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to learn the customer's domain and workflow deeply.
• A track record of leading architectural direction across multiple teams or domains.
• Demonstrated ability to surface unarticulated risks and advocate for architectural improvements.
• Deep expertise in at least one production-grade backend language (e.g., Python, Java, Kotlin, Go, C#).
• Strong foundation in relational schema design, data modelling, and SQL.
• Significant experience with hierarchical, graph-like, or relationship-heavy data structures.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• A track record of improving scalability, reliability, and observability in distributed systems.
• Experience mentoring senior and staff-level engineers.
• Thrive in a collaborative, detail-oriented environment.

Requirements

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

Benefits

• Meaningful compensation, including an employee stock ownership plan.
• Healthcare coverage, including medical, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance.
• Access to a $750 yearly training stipend for learning and development.
• Opportunities for career growth, whether as an individual contributor or as a people leader.