[Hiring] Staff Platform Engineer @Forma.ai

Role Description

Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you will help lead the design and development of foundational platform capabilities that support all backend services. You will work on high-impact, cross-cutting problems that shape how engineers build, ship, secure, and operate services at Forma. You’ll spend significant time designing APIs, data models, application workflows, shared libraries, and backend services that other teams rely on.

• Designing and implementing systems for roles, permissions, and access control across services
• Defining how services access shared permission models and identity data
• Defining how user permissions carry across product surfaces, not just machine-to-machine service authorization
• Building shared backend capabilities that support workflows such as approvals, ticketing, and cross-service coordination
• Building MCP connectors to Forma services, enabling AI tools and agents to securely access product data, workflows, and backend capabilities
• Improving and standardizing CI/CD pipelines across teams
• Establishing robust observability practices, including distributed tracing and monitoring across services
• Helping guide the transition toward a more service-oriented architecture

You will be working on some of the most critical and complex engineering challenges at Forma, with significant influence over system design and engineering practices.

Qualifications

• Strong experience designing and building distributed backend systems
• Strong application engineering skills, including API design, data modeling, service boundaries, and production-quality backend code
• Experience with AI-enabled developer tooling, MCP, or internal engineering automation
• Experience working with service-oriented or microservices architectures
• Deep understanding of authentication, authorization, and access control patterns
• Previously owned or improved CI/CD systems, release processes, and production workflows
• Track record of raising reliability and observability across service boundaries (tracing, correlation, SLOs, or post-incident improvements that team adopted)
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to influence technical direction and collaborate across teams
• High ownership mindset with attention to detail

Requirements

• Experience with distributed tracing and observability tooling (nice to have)
• Exposure to infrastructure and platform engineering concepts (nice to have)
• Experience working in high-growth or scaling engineering teams (nice to have)

Benefits

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

Company Description

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 fueled by our passion for fundamentally changing and shaping how companies use sales intelligence to drive business strategy.

The Core Services team is responsible for the foundational systems that power how Forma’s platform operates at scale, ensuring systems remain reliable, secure, and easy to operate.