Who you are

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

What the job involves

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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

Benefits

• Meaningful Compensation: In addition to being paid above the industry average, you’ll join in Forma.ai’s success with our employee equity plan.
• Healthcare with Benefits: Enjoy a healthcare benefits package that includes extended medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and paid parental leave.
• Unlimited + Min. Vacation: All Formadillos (cute, right?) are required to take a minimum of three weeks vacation. If you need more, just ask!
• Learning & Development: Access the resources you need to grow in your personal and professional life with a yearly training stipend.
• Flexible Working: North American employees can work from where they are most productive, whether that's in our Toronto HQ, from home, or a combination of both.
• Growth & Opportunity: Our rapid growth and novel approach is an opportunity to gain the kind of unique experience you can build a career on.