Senior Staff Backend Engineer (Applications)

About the role

Forma.ai is seeking a Senior Staff Back End Engineer to lead the design and evolution of backend services that power its sales performance platform. The role involves shaping technical direction across multiple product domains, mentoring engineers, and collaborating with product and engineering leadership.

Key responsibilities

• Design and evolve backend services and architectural patterns that span two or more teams or domains.
• Architect data models for hierarchical and graph structures, setting standards for adjacent teams.
• Build deterministic, reliable systems that enable customers to reason clearly about their data.
• Drive cross‑domain architectural decisions balancing extensibility, performance, and operational simplicity.
• Improve observability, testing strategy, and production reliability across owned systems.
• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to translate ambiguous, high‑stakes requirements into scalable designs.
• Mentor engineers across levels and champion AI tooling to accelerate implementation.

Required profile

• Extensive experience designing and building complex backend systems at scale.
• Proven track record of leading architectural direction across multiple teams or domains.
• Strong product judgment and ability to influence stakeholders beyond the immediate team.
• Experience surfacing unarticulated risks and advocating architectural improvements.
• Demonstrated ability to improve scalability, reliability, and observability in distributed systems.

Required skills

• Production‑grade backend language such as Python, Java, Kotlin, Go or C#.
• Relational schema design, data modelling and SQL.
• Experience with hierarchical, graph‑like or relationship‑heavy data structures; familiarity with graph databases is a plus.
• Java/Spring Boot, Django, PostgreSQL.
• AWS infrastructure and Docker; Kubernetes familiarity.
• Use of AI tooling to enhance development velocity.