Staff Engineer, Payments

About the role: We’re on a mission to build the first holistic smart payment solution-one that maximizes authorization rates for our merchants by intelligently determining and executing the optimal strategy for every transaction. Our Payments team is designing and running highly critical, production-grade infrastructure, and we’re looking for a deeply technical engineer to help shape it from the ground up. In this role, you’ll lead the design and development of payment products, build resilient infrastructure, dive deep into technical complexity to solve production challenges, and work closely with teammates, stakeholders, and customers to understand their needs. You’ll have end-to-end ownership-from architecture and coding to deployment and monitoring-while helping set the technical direction for a growing initiative. This is an early-stage effort, giving you the chance to be a founding member, influence architectural decisions, and directly impact merchant success. We value thoughtful technology choices, resourcefulness, and a fast-moving, problem-solving mindset. Our engineers are creative, independent, and adaptable, working with a diverse stack of technologies to deliver maximum value to our clients. What you’ll be doing Build and enhance payment products-creating new systems from scratch while improving and integrating with existing ones Design and implement resilient, production-grade infrastructure that can handle critical workloads Lead technical initiatives within the Payments team, collaborating with teammates and stakeholders across Forter Work across a diverse tech stack and programming languages Brainstorm and shape features with product managers and peers, guiding decisions with your technical expertise Work closely with customers to understand their needs and translate them into impactful payment solutions Mentor and support fellow engineers Dive deep into technical complexity to diagnose and solve production issues Take initiative-if you see a way to make our systems or workflow better, own it and make it happen What you'll need: 7+ years building and maintaining complex software systems 5+ years backend experience, with a strong focus on production-grade systems 2+ years JavaScript experience Hands-on experience with critical production systems - high availability, reliability, and scalability Familiarity with browser, networking, and security concepts Product, production, and growth mindsets Passion for solving technical challenges that directly impact users and operations Strong communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills Can-do attitude with ownership mentality Professional-level spoken and written English It'd be cool if you also have: Extensive experience with Node.JS Experience leading cross-team initiatives Frontend / React / Mobile experience Significant experience with databases/datastores (MySQL, Redis, ElasticSearch) Experience from previous payments companies / projects Experience building Enterprise-grade SaaS products 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 outsize