Staff Engineer, Brain Team

Why you should join us?

Our Brain team in Forter is looking for a Staff Engineer with broad experience and a passion for building scalable and resilient systems. Reliability, latency, and security, along with being present where our customers need us, are critical to our success. Every single request we receive and process is crucial to us and our customers. We can’t go down because our customers’ businesses depend on us. We process e-commerce transactions worth over $250B a year and make billions of critical decisions. 

We utilize highly sensitive information our customers trust us with, to catch fraudsters and abusers and let consumers operate without any friction. 

Our systems run on thousands of machines, on multiple regions and clouds, at a massive scale, to provide the best service to the Enterprise customers we serve.

One of your goals as a Staff Engineer in the brain team is to ensure our core decision systems provide the most accurate decision with short time constraints. You’ll be mentoring and working closely with smart, talented and sharp software engineers, creating highly sophisticated, robust, fault-tolerant and low latency distributed systems. 

What you'll be doing:

• Act as a technical leader for product definitions: make architectural decisions, get buy-ins from internal clients across the organization, provide a formal way of documentation (i.e ADRs)
• Design, build and think over the core decision system at Forter. 
• Fight to bring down latency while improving precision and adding more complexity to the system. 
• Lead and create an observability solution for a distributed system with hundreds of components - how do we detect latency degradation, how do we segment it by merchants / geo / vertical / etc?
• Create automatic alerts / change of behavior due to latency changes or spikes.
• Lead Forter’s complex core decisioning topology while rethinking and challenging it to fit our ever-changing needs.
• Mentor senior engineers to support their growth and development

What you'll need:

• Strong Python / Java / Kotlin / NodeJS / Go / Scala / Haskell / Ruby / PHP skills.
• Proven experience in designing and building large-scale production systems.
• Experience (or good familiarity) with technologies such as Storm and Spark, and concepts such as Event Sourcing, DLQ and Circuit Breakers.
• Experience with various databases or data stores such as Elasticsearch, Redis, MySQL, Aerospike, Couchbase, MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB, etc. 
• Experience with AWS or other public clouds.
• Passionate about coding and mentoring others.
• Experience with docker or other container management platforms
• Experience with an observability / APM system such as Honeycomb, Datadog, etc.

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)
• Fortune’s Best Workplaces in NYC (2022)
• #3 on Fast Company’s list of “Most Innovative Finance Companies” (2022)
• Forbes Cloud 100 (2021, 2022)
• 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 500 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 Nordstrom, Priceline, Instacart and ASOS 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.

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 [email protected]. This information will be treated as confidential and used only for the purpose of determining an appropriate accommodation for the interview process.

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)
• 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)