Staff Engineer, Data Products

About the role:

Forter is looking for a Staff engineer to join our Data Products team. 

The team owns the data platform layer underneath Forter’s core operations. 

It builds and operates the real-time data processing systems, quality pipelines, schema infrastructure, and knowledge base tooling that make agent-driven work trustworthy at scale. 

At peak, the streaming systems the team works on handle ~350,000  events per second while sustaining thousands of transactions per second through Flink-based pipelines.

 

We’re looking for a Staff Engineer to join the team as a technical anchor: a team player with the range to drive architecture and the willingness to be hands-on in execution.

Why should you join us?

This is a platform role at an inflection point. Every AI workflow at Forter runs on the data layer this team owns. The better the foundation, the faster the rest of the company can build.

What you’ll be doing:

• Design, build, and operate Flink-based streaming pipelines at production scale, the real-time processing systems at the core of Forter’s internal workflows
• Own data quality and observability infrastructure: schema contracts, freshness monitoring, ownership registries, and the alerting systems that catch problems before they affect downstream processes
• Build and evolve the knowledge base tooling that makes institutional context queryable for agents and engineers
• Drive data integrity work: design systems that recover reliably from failure and make the underlying platform trustworthy by default
• Collaborate with the Agentic Data Foundation initiative as Forter builds a company-wide data layer; Data Products is where the proof of concept gets built and validated
• Set technical direction across the team’s systems and hold architecture standards with the EM and other Staff engineers.

What you’ll need:

• 8+ years of production backend or data infrastructure experience, with at least 2 years at Staff Engineer or equivalent level
• Excellent teamwork and communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to explain complex systems and facilitate collaborative solutions.
• Deep experience with stream processing systems (Flink, Kafka, or equivalents) at production scale, including failure modes, recovery, and operational burden
• Strong distributed systems instincts: you think about correctness and reliability before you think about features
• Experience with data quality or observability infrastructure. You’ve built or owned the systems that keep a data platform honest
• Internal product mindset: you treat the teams you serve as customers and make deliberate choices about what to build vs. what not to build

It’d be really cool if you also:

• Have worked with data contracts, schema registries, or data governance tooling
• Have experience with JVM languages (Scala, Java, Kotlin) and big data DBs (Aerospike/elasticsearch/etc)
• Have contributed to agentic or LLM-adjacent infrastructure. You understand what “data quality for agents” actually means in practice
• Have operated at a team technical anchor level in a small, high-scope team where breadth of ownership is the normv

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.