Senior Data Engineer, Identity

About the role:

The Identity Group stands at the core of Forter’s competitive edge in the market. The group is in charge of creating the engine that identifies clients and builds Forter’s knowledge of them. Due to its criticality, Forter’s identity engine is a focal point from both a business and a technical perspective. That centrality means that we are always looking for new ways to make the engine faster, easier to modify, with higher throughput, and better accuracy.

We're looking for a talented Senior Data Engineer to join the Identity Data team. The team is in charge of the critical data pipeline that processes and aggregates the huge quantity of events that, over time, build Forter’s identity data corpus.

The story told from a technical perspective:

•  >2 billion person entities stored jointly in various database engines to support different fetching requirements (e.g. Elasticsearch, Aerospike, Redis, S3, Snowflake, RocksDB)
• Providing service to all Forter decisions, generating some of the most critical model inputs
• The most major contributor to Forter’s decision latency, a big part of the decision cost. Making high-risk / high-reward investments in cutting edge technologies to optimize at the core of business
• Over 200k events per second are being processed by our recognition engine which has to remain super cheap (Elasticsearch backed) 
• Many analysts all around the organization that research our data and work hard at bettering it

The team (as the whole group) is almost entirely non-functional metrics driven. Most of our efforts go into improving precision, latency, throughput, and cost efficiency. This means engineers are required for a high level of technical skill and a keen sense for performance and cost efficiency. It also means that engineering initiatives represent a very large portion (>50%) of what we do.

What you'll be doing:

• Design, Build, and Maintain Near-real-time Event Ingress Pipelines: Take the lead in architecting, developing, and ensuring the ongoing operation of sophisticated event ingress pipelines that handle vast amounts of data in near-real time
• Partake in Setting Technical Strategy: Contribute your expertise to shaping the technical strategy for the detection domain, participating in discussions that set the course for our technology's future.
• Lead Development Efforts: Drive major development initiatives, from concept to deployment, ensuring the successful execution of projects that enhance the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of our systems.
• Identify Pains and Promote Solutions: Analyze the systems to identify pain points and inefficiencies. Develop and implement effective solutions that streamline processes, enhance productivity, and elevate the overall performance of the event ingress pipelines.

What you'll need:

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Extensive background in backend engineering, with a focus on JVM
• Experience working with and maintaining distributed production databases
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• Fluent in spoken and written English

It'd be cool if you also: [not a must]

• Work experience in teams that maintain an engine rather than a product
• Experience with event streaming frameworks
• Strong Python skills

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)
• Fortune’s Best Workplaces in NYC (2022)
• #3 on Fast Company’s list of “Most Innovative Finance Companies” (2022)
• Forbes Cloud 100 (2021, 2022)
• 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 500 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 Nordstrom, Priceline, Instacart and ASOS 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.