Staff Engineer, Decision Engineering
About the role:
Forter is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Decision Engineering team. 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:
- Lead the architecture and evolution of Forter’s decision engine and related services: real‑time decision APIs, rule and policy engines, model‑serving interfaces, and the orchestration layers that tie them together.
- Design and implement highly available, low‑latency, distributed systems that process large‑scale event streams and support complex decision workflows.
- Collaborate with product, risk, and customer‑facing teams to translate risk strategy and merchant needs into robust system capabilities (e.g., configurable decision flows, exemptions, auditability, analytics surfaces).
- Mentor and coach engineers across levels in areas such as distributed systems design, reliability engineering, and systems thinking, elevating the overall standard of engineering in the group.
- Participate in technical discussions and customer interactions, providing expertise and clear communication when supporting enterprise integrations.
What you'll need:
- 7+ years of experience building backend systems in large-scale production environments
- 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:
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, 2024 and 2025)
- #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.
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.