Staff Platform Engineer

Forma.ai•Toronto, ON

4d•Hybrid

About The Position

Forma.ai is a Series B startup revolutionizing sales compensation. The Core Services team is responsible for foundational systems like service-to-service communication, permissions, release infrastructure, and observability. As the platform scales towards a distributed, multi-service architecture, this team ensures systems remain reliable, secure, and easy to operate. The work involves backend engineering and infrastructure, focusing on robust, scalable software systems. The team values low meetings and high accountability, with most members in the EST time zone.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

Help lead the design and development of foundational platform capabilities that support all backend services.
Work on high-impact, cross-cutting problems that shape how engineers build, ship, secure, and operate services at Forma.
Spend significant time designing APIs, data models, application workflows, shared libraries, and backend services that other teams rely on.
Design and implement systems for roles, permissions, and access control across services.
Define how services access shared permission models and identity data.
Define how user permissions carry across product surfaces, not just machine-to-machine service authorization.
Build shared backend capabilities that support workflows such as approvals, ticketing, and cross-service coordination.
Build MCP connectors to Forma services, enabling AI tools and agents to securely access product data, workflows, and backend capabilities.
Improve and standardize CI/CD pipelines across teams.
Establish robust observability practices, including distributed tracing and monitoring across services.
Guide the transition toward a more service-oriented architecture.
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.