Senior Backend Engineer (Applications)

About the role

We build enterprise software that helps organizations optimize sales performance and improve go-to-market agility. Our engineering organization includes multiple product application teams responsible for delivering core customer-facing capabilities. We are seeking Senior Backend Engineers to join our application teams. You'll work alongside staff, senior, and early-career engineers to design, build, and scale backend systems that power enterprise-grade product workflows. This is an opportunity to work on complex product and data problems while contributing meaningfully to technical decisions, system quality, and team delivery. We are low on meetings and high on accountability. Most of the team is in the EST time zone, with a few located in AST, PST, and Central as well.

Responsibilities

• You will play an important role in the continued evolution of our application stack. You will design and build backend capabilities for complex product workflows, contribute to system design discussions, and help ensure our systems remain maintainable, reliable, and scalable as we grow.
• As a Senior Backend Engineer, you are expected to operate with strong ownership and sound technical judgment. This includes identifying risks in the work you own, surfacing edge cases, asking thoughtful questions, and proposing improvements that strengthen the quality and reliability of the system.
• You will:
• Design and build backend services that power complex product workflows.
• Contribute to data models for hierarchical, relationship-heavy, and enterprise-scale datasets.
• Make technical decisions that balance maintainability, performance, and operational simplicity.
• Improve testing, observability, and production reliability within the services you work on.
• Partner with Product to translate business requirements into clean, scalable backend designs.
• Participate in design reviews, code reviews, and technical discussions.
• Support other engineers through pairing, reviews, and knowledge sharing.
• Use AI tooling to improve delivery speed while maintaining strong engineering standards.

Requirements

• Strong experience designing and building backend systems in production environments.
• Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Java, Python, Kotlin, Go, C#, or similar.
• Strong foundation in SQL, relational schema design, and data modeling.
• Experience with hierarchical, graph-like, relationship-heavy, or workflow-driven data structures.
• Ability to identify technical risks, reason through tradeoffs, and propose practical improvements.
• Experience improving scalability, reliability, observability, or maintainability in production systems.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Comfort collaborating across Engineering, Product, and Analytics while remaining hands-on.
• Experience building SaaS products for 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, RevOps, Incentive Compensation, or related domains.
• Technologies we use
• Frontend: JavaScript, React, TypeScript
• Backend: Java/Spring Boot, Django, Postgres
• Infrastructure: AWS, Docker
• What success looks like: 30/60/90 days
• First 30 days
• You'll build context across Forma.ai 's product, customers, backend architecture, data models, and engineering practices.
• By the end of your first 30 days, you will have:
• Set up your development environment and become comfortable navigating the codebase, services, and infrastructure.
• Built a clear understanding of the product domain, backend architecture, and key data flows.
• Learned the team's practices around testing, observability, deployment, and reliability.
• Built relationships with Engineering, Product, and Analytics partners.
• Shipped small improvements or fixes to build familiarity with the system.
• First 60 days
• You'll begin owning meaningful backend work and contributing to technical decisions.
• By the end of your first 60 days, you will have:
• Taken ownership of a backend component, service, workflow, or feature area.
• Designed and delivered maintainable backend code aligned with team standards.
• Partnered with Product and Engineering peers to translate requirements into scalable backend designs.
• Identified risks, edge cases, or inconsistencies in the systems you work on.
• Contributed to improvements in data modeling, service

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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