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 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)
• Fortune’s Best Workplaces in NYC (2022, 2023 and 2024)
• Forbes Cloud 100 (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025)
• #3 on Fast Company’s list of “Most Innovative Finance Companies” (2022)
• Anti-Fraud Solution of the Year at the Payments Awards (2024)
• SAP Pinnacle Awards “New Partner Application Award” (2023)
• Fintech Breakthrough Awards – Best Fraud Prevention Platform (2023)
  
  

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.

Forter is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer that will consider all qualified applicants, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, gender identity or expression, national origin, genetics, age, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please email us at interviewaccommodation@forter.com. This information will be treated as confidential and used only for the purpose of determining an appropriate accommodation for the interview process.

Hybrid work:

At Forter, we embrace a hybrid work model that blends in-person connection with the flexibility of remote work. Team members based near our key hubs are expected to work from the office at least three days per week. We believe that regular face-to-face collaboration fuels professional development, strengthens our culture, and builds the relationships that help teams thrive.

Forter's Applicant Privacy Policy