Staff Engineer, Core Engineering

About the role:

Forter is looking for a Staff Engineer to join our Core Engineering group. The group is responsible for the real-time, low-latency infrastructure that powers Forter’s fraud decisions and external APIs.

Our systems process billions of requests every day, ensuring high availability, security, and performance at global scale.

In this role, you’ll work on core backend components such as our decision engine, ingestion and enrichment pipelines, schema management systems, and self-serve API platform. The software you build will power critical business decisions and directly serve some of the world’s largest merchants.

This is a high-impact, high-ownership position for an engineer who thrives on solving complex distributed systems challenges, cares deeply about production-grade quality, and wants to shape the foundation of Forter’s decisioning platform.

What you'll be doing:

• Design, build, and scale backend systems that power Forter’s real-time decisioning and APIs.
• Own projects end-to-end - from design and implementation to production rollout and monitoring.
• Ensure systems are low-latency, fault-tolerant, and high-throughput across distributed environments.
• Enhance observability, reliability, and developer experience through strong operational and tooling practices.
• Collaborate with Product, analysts, data scientists, and infrastructure teams to drive innovation across Forter’s decision ecosystem.
• Participate in technical discussions and customer interactions, providing expertise and clear communication when supporting enterprise integrations.

What you'll need:

• 10+ years of experience building backend systems in large-scale production environments, with at least 2 years as a Staff Engineer or equivalent level
• Strong programming skills in Python, Java, Kotlin, or Node.js
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native technologies (AWS, Kubernetes, Docker)
• Proven ability to design and maintain high-scale distributed systems
• Strong sense of ownership, autonomy, and accountability
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex systems clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences - including direct collaboration with customers worldwide

It'd be cool if you also have:

• Experience with API Gateway architectures, schema/versioning strategies, or platformization efforts
• Familiarity with real-time data processing frameworks (e.g., Flink, Storm) and resilience patterns
• Background working alongside data science or machine learning teams
• Contributions to developer platforms, infrastructure services, or internal tools improving engineering velocity

About Us:

Commerce is evolving faster than the systems built to support it. Agentic AI is redrawing how people buy. Customer expectations have a new ceiling. And bad actors are evolving alongside every advancement.

Forter was built to meet this moment - and stay ahead of it.

We are a human-first, AI-built company. Our technology analyzes patterns across a network of over 2 billion shoppers, delivering identity intelligence across the entire commerce journey — from sign-up to checkout to returns — that protects revenue and unlocks great customer experiences simultaneously. With Forter, businesses know who to trust, whether it’s humans or the agents shopping for them. The result: zero friction for the customers who matter. No revenue left behind.

The world's most trusted brands — Nordstrom, Instacart, Priceline, Adobe, ASOS, and eBay among them — rely on Forter to get this right. Since 2013, we've raised $525M from investors including Tiger Global, Bessemer, Sequoia Capital, and Salesforce Ventures, and today we power commerce decisions for nearly 1 million businesses globally. We're more than fraud, payments and orchestration – we make trust a competitive advantage.

Trust is backed by data – Forter is a recipient of over 10 workplace and innovation awards, including:

• Great Place to Work Certification (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025)
• Fortune’s Best Workplaces in NYC (2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025)
• Forbes Cloud 100 (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025)
• Anti-Fraud Solution of the Year at the Payments Awards (2024)

Life as a Forterian:

Forterians are, genuinely, some of the best people you'll work with. Smart, curious, and deeply good humans who care about the work and each other. That's not an accident — it's something we've been intentional about since day one, and it's the thing people mention most when they talk about why they stay. When you're surrounded by people like this, doing work that actually matters, it changes what a job can feel like.

Forter was built on a simple but powerful conviction: when AI does its job, humans can do theirs better. That philosophy shapes our products and shapes how we work. AI is core to our workflows — not as a shortcut, but as a force multiplier that gives Forterians the space to focus their energy where human judgment is irreplaceable.

We're a global team of 500+ people, with regional headquarters in New York, Tel Aviv, London, and Singapore, and employee presence across the US, Canada, Germany, France, Japan, China, and Australia. Our teams are cross-functional by design, and the work you do here is visible, consequential, and connected to the outcomes that matter.

You'll have real ownership here and proximity to decisions. And we back that with investment in your growth — RSU offerings, L&D programs built around AI tools, and a culture of recognition rooted in our 4.5 day weeks (aka Forter’s Appreciation Fridays and Sundays). From team outings to local cultural celebrations, we mark the moments that matter — wherever you are in the world. We don't want Forter to be just another job. We want it to be the place you build.

If you're ready to work on a problem that sits at the intersection of AI, commerce, and human trust, this is it.

Forter is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer that will consider all qualified applicants, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, gender identity or expression, national origin, genetics, age, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please email us at interviewaccommodation@forter.com. This information will be treated as confidential and used only for the purpose of determining an appropriate accommodation for the interview process.

Hybrid work:

At Forter, we embrace a hybrid work model that blends in-person connection with the flexibility of remote work. Team members based near our key hubs are expected to work from the office at least three days per week. We believe that regular face-to-face collaboration fuels professional development, strengthens our culture, and builds the relationships that help teams thrive.