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: 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 cultu