Senior Data Engineer, Research Engineering

About the role:

Forter is looking for a Senior Data Engineer to join its Research Engineering team. The Research Engineering team’s mission is to enable Forter’s research needs. We succeed when our research analysts, data scientists, and engineers have access to the data, tools, knowledge, and support to do their jobs painlessly and efficiently.

We build the foundational infrastructure and key applications that allow internal users to derive actionable insights from Forter’s vast data. Both enabling–and running–Big Data processing at the scale of hundreds of TB is a core part of what our team does, but we’re not just a Big Data team. We work across the tech stack in support of our mission to enable data-driven research and investigation, from back-end to front-end to data stores.

What you'll be doing:

• Design, build, and maintain foundational infrastructure and key applications that allow people to effectively leverage Forter’s proprietary and public data
• Use modern technologies daily, such as: Snowflake, Databricks, Apache Spark, Elasticsearch, AWS, Kafka, and more
• Expand and optimize Forter’s data warehouse and lakehouse–weighing tradeoffs between performance, cost, and user experience–across continually larger and more complex datasets
• Model data and define storage strategy, to ensure that data is intuitive for researchers to find, and easy and fast for them to access
• Enhance Forter analysts’ most-used web application, which gives them in-depth insight into every decision we make
• Collaborate directly with colleagues from various disciplines: Analysts, Data Scientists, and other Engineers (all of whom write production code!)
• Self-manage project planning, milestones, designs, and estimations
• Hold yourself and others to a high standard when working with production systems. We take pride in our tests, monitoring & alerting abilities just as we do with our systems.
• Debug complex problems across the whole stack

What you'll need:

• 5+ years of proven experience with designing, implementing, and maintaining large-scale backend production systems
• Experience building and maintaining data-intensive applications
• Experience with data processing technologies, e.g. Spark, Flink, EMR, Iceberg
• Experience with data warehousing frameworks, e.g. Snowflake, Hive, Glue, Databricks Unity Catalog
• Experience working in Python
• Experience with AWS or other public clouds
• Professional proficiency in English

Would be cool if you have:

• Experience with a JVM-based language
• Experience with NoSQL databases, e.g. ElasticSearch, AeroSpike, Cassandra, MongoDB
• A strong command of SQL
• Experience building web applications

• Interesting, non-trivial problems you’ve dealt with
• A link to a blog post you wrote or an interesting talk you’ve given
• Open source projects you’ve created or contributed to
• Side projects that you couldn’t resist building

About us:

Digital commerce is built on trust. At every point along the eCommerce journey, businesses must make a critical decision: Can I trust this customer? Answering this simple question accurately and instantly is powerful—it can accelerate revenue growth and strengthen a company’s connection with its customers. How do we do it? Forter was founded on the insight that it's not about what is being purchased, nor where— but who is behind the interaction.

The Forter Decision Engine finds patterns across more than one billion identities in our dataset. We isolate fraudsters and protect customers—ensuring everyone gets the experience they deserve.  Given that trust is central to how we operate, Forter is very much driven by a defined set of values. We attract remarkable talent and have retention and engagement levels that are well above benchmarks. We’re meticulous about strengthening our culture as we grow and ensuring this is an environment where people can have outsized impact. 

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)
• Fortune’s Best Workplaces in NYC (2022, 2023 and 2024)
• Forbes Cloud 100 (2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024)
• #3 on Fast Company’s list of “Most Innovative Finance Companies” (2022)
• Anti-Fraud Solution of the Year at the Payments Awards (2024)
• SAP Pinnacle Awards “New Partner Application Award” (2023)
• Fintech Breakthrough Awards – Best Fraud Prevention Platform (2023)

Life as a Forterian:

We are a team of over 600 Forterians spread across 3 different continents. Since 2013, we've raised $525 million from investors such as Tiger Global, Bessemer, Sequoia Capital, March Capital and Salesforce Ventures. We're on a mission to bring trust to global digital commerce so that companies like Adobe, ASOS, eBay, Instacart, Priceline and Nordstrom can block fraud, drive revenue and improve customer experience.

At Forter, we believe unique people create unique ideas, and valuable experience comes in many forms. So, even if your background doesn't match everything we have listed in the job description, we still encourage you to apply and tell us why your skills and values could be an asset to us. By welcoming different perspectives, we grow together as humans and as a company.