Staff Back End Engineer (Applications)

Back to jobsStaff Back End Engineer (Applications)Toronto, CanadaApplyAbout Forma.ai:  Forma.ai is a Series B startup that's revolutionizing how sales compensation is designed, managed and optimized. We handle billions in annual managed commissions for market leaders like Edmentum, Stryker, and Autodesk.  Our growth has been fuelled by our passion for fundamentally changing and shaping how companies use sales intelligence to drive business strategy.   We’re welcoming equally driven individuals who are excited about creating something big! About the Team We build enterprise software that helps organizations optimize sales performance, enabling go-to-market agility. Our engineering organization includes multiple product application teams responsible for delivering core customer-facing capabilities. We are seeking Staff Backend Engineers to join our application teams. You’ll work alongside other staff, senior, and early-career engineers to define, evolve, and scale the systems that power enterprise-grade product workflows. This is an opportunity to influence both technical direction and product direction. We are low on meetings, high on accountability. Most of the team are in EST time zone but we have a few located in AST, PST and Central as well. What you’ll be doing You will play a critical role in the continued evolution of our application stack. You will lead development efforts for complex backend capabilities and serve as a technical example in system design, code quality, and long-term maintainability. You’ll operate at the intersection of data modelling, business logic, and enterprise scale reliability. As a Staff Engineer, you are expected to operate with a high degree of ownership and trust. This includes proactively identifying architectural risks, surfacing edge cases or constraints others may not see, and advocating for improvements that strengthen the long-term integrity of the system. We value engineers who bring forward thoughtful perspectives - even when they challenge assumptions - and who help the team see around corners. You will: Design and evolve backend services that power product workflows. Architect data models representing hierarchical & graph structures, relationships, and large-scale enterprise datasets. Build deterministic, reliable systems that allow customers to reason clearly about their data. Drive architectural decisions that balance extensibility, performance, and operational simplicity. Improve observability, testing strategy, and production reliability across backend services. Partner closely with Product to translate nuanced business requirements into clean, scalable designs. Mentor engineers across levels and help raise the bar for backend engineering standards. Use, and demonstrate using, AI tooling to improve implementation velocity while thoughtfully investing in technical and product specifications What We're Looking for: Significant experience designing and building complex backend systems in production environments. Demonstrated ability to surface unarticulated risks, propose alternative approaches, and advocate for architectural improvements with sound technical reasoning. Expertise in at least one production-grade backend language (e.g., Python, Java, Kotlin, Go, C#, etc.). Strong foundation in relational schema design, data modelling, and SQL. Experience working with hierarchical, graph-like, or relationship-heavy data structures. Familiarity with graph databases or graph-based modelling concepts is a strong plus. Excellent written and verbal communication skills. A track record of improving scalability, reliability, and observability in distributed or data-intensive systems. A desire to influence architecture and product direction - not just implement tickets. Thrive in a collaborative, detail-oriented environment across Engineering, Product, and Analytics. Nice to have: Experience building SaaS products serving mid-market or enterprise customers. Experience building...