Staff Back End Engineer (Applications)

About the role

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 Staff Backend Engineers to join our application teams. You'll work alongside other staff, senior, and early-career engineers to define, evolve, and scale the systems that power enterprise-grade product workflows. This is an opportunity to influence both technical direction and product direction. We are low on meetings, high on accountability. Most of the team are in EST time zone but we have a few located in AST, PST and Central as well.

Responsibilities

• You will:
• Design and evolve backend services that power product workflows.
• 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 balance extensibility, performance, and operational simplicity.
• Improve observability, testing strategy, and production reliability across backend services.
• Partner closely with Product to translate nuanced business requirements into clean, scalable designs.
• Mentor engineers across levels and help raise the bar for backend engineering standards.
• Use, and demonstrate using, AI tooling to improve implementation velocity while thoughtfully investing in technical and product specifications

Requirements

• Significant experience designing and building complex backend systems in production environments.
• Demonstrated ability to surface unarticulated risks, propose alternative approaches, and advocate for architectural improvements with sound technical reasoning.
• 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.
• 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.
• A track record of improving scalability, reliability, and observability in distributed or data-intensive systems.
• A desire to influence architecture and product direction - not just implement tickets.
• Thrive in a collaborative, detail-oriented environment across Engineering, Product, and Analytics.
• 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.
• 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 infras

Additional Information

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!

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