Senior Software Engineer II – Engine Dynamics

About the team

At Forter, where ideas drive innovation, complexity is the main friction that slows ideas from becoming reality – and thus our biggest productivity challenge.

The Engine Dynamics team owns the insight‑to‑production experience for Forter’s Decision Engine. We treat the engine development process as a product: reducing complexity, improving confidence, lowering production faults and easing the mental load on all engine development teams.

About the role:

We’re looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer II to lead multi‑quarter initiatives that shape how Forter’s Decision Engine is designed, developed and operated, with impact that clearly goes beyond a single team. You’ll combine hands‑on backend work with technical leadership, simplifying complex systems, improving developer experience, and raising reliability at scale for multiple engine teams.

What you will be doing:

• Lead multi‑quarter, team‑scoped projects that change how we build, validate and ship engine changes, from problem definition to rollout.
• Remodel key parts of the Decision Engine and its tooling to reduce toil, simplify workflows, and make complex changes safer and faster to deploy.
• Own critical engine platform components (validation, fault detection, developer tools) used by multiple engine teams.
• Turn ambiguous engine‑level problems into clear plans, breaking them into milestones, aligning stakeholders, and driving execution.
• Mentor engineers in and around the team, raising the bar via design reviews, pairing, and clear technical guidance.

Who are you?

• 7+ years of experience building backend systems in large‑scale, mission‑critical environments, acting as a technical lead for substantial projects.
• Experience working on high-scale production systems, ideally in areas involving data-intensive flows or distributed data stores.
• Deep familiarity with cloud‑native environments (AWS / GCP / Azure, Kubernetes, Docker) and production‑grade observability and deployment practices.
• Proven track record of leading multi‑quarter, team‑scoped projects end‑to‑end, including collaboration with product/analytics/other engineering teams.
• Strong skills in one or more of Python / Java / Kotlin / Rust / Go, and solid understanding of modern backend architectures.
• Demonstrated subject‑matter expertise in at least one relevant domain (e.g., distributed backends, developer productivity tooling, CI/CD, runtime reliability, data/stream processing) and comfort working in high‑ambiguity areas.

It’d be really cool if you also:

• Experience materially improving team productivity via CI/CD, build systems, or internal developer platforms.
• Experience defining and driving engineering standards adopted beyond a single team.

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, 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:

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.