Senior/ Staff Platform Engineer

Fora•New York, NY

8h•$155,000 - $225,000•Hybrid

About The Position

We’re looking for an experienced Senior/Staff Software engineer to lead and scale the foundational systems that power Fora’s platform. In this role, you’ll own the reliability, scalability, and developer experience of our infrastructure — including CI/CD pipelines, cloud architecture, observability systems, and core platform security. You’ll partner closely with Engineering, and cross-functional stakeholders to ensure our systems are fast, secure, and built to scale with our business. Our ideal candidate is a mission-aligned leader with a strong track record of building high scale and secure platforms, an understanding of devops, data pipelines and distributed systems, and a passion for scaling both products and teams.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in engineering, at least 2 in platform engineering
Strong experience with AWS services (EKS, RDS, ALB/ELB, SQS, CloudWatch, IAM)
Proven track record with infrastructure as code tools (Terraform preferred)
Experience with PostgreSQL administration including performance tuning, replication, and connection management
Experience with message queue systems (RabbitMQ, Kafka, Celery, or similar)
Proficiency with monitoring and observability tools (Datadog, Prometheus, or similar APM solutions)
Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, feature flags)
Understanding of security best practices including secrets management, network security, and compliance requirements
Expertise with container orchestration in production environments, including cluster management, networking, and troubleshooting (Kubernetes preferred)
Excellent communication skills with ability to explain complex infrastructure concepts to diverse audiences
Experience with cost optimization and capacity planning for cloud infrastructure

Nice To Haves

Experience with high-traffic B2B2C platforms or marketplace architectures.

Responsibilities

Optimize database performance and reliability, managing PostgreSQL configurations, connection pooling, timeout settings, and query performance at scale.
Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that enable rapid, safe deployments with progressive rollout capabilities and automated rollback mechanisms.
Manage message queue infrastructure including RabbitMQ and Celery workers, ensuring optimal throughput and preventing memory pressure issues.
Build developer tools and platforms that accelerate engineering velocity, including feature flag systems, development environments, and debugging tools.
Implement infrastructure as code using Terraform, ensuring all infrastructure changes are versioned, reviewed, and reproducible.
Architect and implement monitoring and observability solutions using Datadog, CloudWatch, and custom metrics to ensure comprehensive system visibility.
Drive security and compliance initiatives, including secrets management, network segmentation.
Partner with engineering teams to establish SLOs, implement proper error budgets, and ensure services meet reliability targets.
Design and maintain our container orchestration layer, bonus if familiar with Kubernetes.