Staff Platform Engineer

About the team:

The Core Services team is responsible for the foundational systems that power how Forma’s platform operates at scale. This includes service-to-service communication, permissions and access control, release infrastructure, and observability.

As our platform scales toward a more distributed, multi-service architecture, this team plays a critical role in ensuring systems remain reliable, secure, and easy to operate. The work here sits at the intersection of backend engineering and infrastructure, with a strong emphasis on building robust, scalable software systems.

We are low on meetings and high on accountability, with most of the team in the EST time zone.

What you'll be doing:

Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you will help lead the design and development of foundational platform capabilities that support all backend services.

You will work on high-impact, cross-cutting problems that shape how engineers build, ship, secure, and operate services at Forma. You’ll spend significant time designing APIs, data models, application workflows, shared libraries, and backend services that other teams rely on.

Key areas of ownership include:

• Designing and implementing systems for roles, permissions, and access control across services
• Defining how services access shared permission models and identity data
• Defining how user permissions carry across product surfaces, not just machine-to-machine service authorization
• Building shared backend capabilities that support workflows such as approvals, ticketing, and cross-service coordination
• Building MCP connectors to Forma services, enabling AI tools and agents to securely access product data, workflows, and backend capabilities
• Improving and standardizing CI/CD pipelines across teams
• Establishing robust observability practices, including distributed tracing and monitoring across services
• Helping guide the transition toward a more service-oriented architecture

You will be working on some of the most critical and complex engineering challenges at Forma, with significant influence over system design and engineering practices.

What skills / traits are we looking for:

• Strong experience designing and building distributed backend systems
• Strong application engineering skills, including API design, data modeling, service boundaries, and production-quality backend code
• Experience with AI-enabled developer tooling, MCP, or internal engineering automation
• Experience working with service-oriented or microservices architectures
• Deep understanding of authentication, authorization, and access control patterns
• Previously owned or improved CI/CD systems, release processes, and production workflows
• Track record of raising reliability and observability across service boundaries (tracing, correlation, SLOs, or post-incident improvements that team adopted).
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to influence technical direction and collaborate across teams
• High ownership mindset with attention to detail

Nice to have:

• Experience with distributed tracing and observability tooling
• Exposure to infrastructure and platform engineering concepts
• Experience working in high-growth or scaling engineering teams

Technologies we use:

• Backend: Java, Django, Postgres
• Infrastructure: AWS, Docker, GitHub Actions, Databricks, Datadog, Grafana, Kubernetes, Helm, Argo

What success looks like:

First 30 Days

• Develop a deep understanding of Forma’s backend architecture, service boundaries, core infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines and release workflows
• Get hands-on with the codebase by contributing production code to core services or shared libraries
• Identify gaps in current implementations around service communication, auth, or observability
• Produce at least one concrete technical proposal (design doc) targeting a high-impact core services improvement

60 Days

• Own and deliver a meaningful backend/platform improvement within Core Services, such as a permissions access layer, approval workflow component, service auth pattern, or shared application library
• Write and ship well-designed, production-quality code that improves product capabilities, system reliability, or developer workflows
• Contribute to technical design discussions with clear tradeoffs and implementation plans
• Begin shaping standards for how services interact across auth, permissions, data access, workflow ownership, and API boundaries

90 Days

• Lead the design and implementation of a complex, cross-service engineering solution, such as a permissions framework, approval workflow subsystem, or inter-service authorization model
• Drive adoption of new patterns through high-quality code, documentation, and collaboration
• Establish engineering best practices for building and operating services in a distributed environment
• Act as a technical leader by raising the bar for code quality, system design, maintainability, and production ownership

 
Additional Job Info:

• This position is for an existing vacancy

What you can expect from us: 

• Meaningful compensation. In addition to your base salary, you’ll join our employee stock ownership plan to further recognize your contributions to Forma.ai’s success 
• Healthcare coverage. We have a full benefits package that includes medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance, and a paid parental leave program 
• Learning and development. Access the resources you want to help you grow in your role by utilizing our $750 yearly training stipend 
• Growth. You’ll have a huge opportunity to build a career for yourself and gain the type of experience you’re looking for – whether that’s as an individual contributor or as a people leader