Back End Engineer- TQM

Position: Staff Back End Engineer- TQM
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 and improve go-to-market agility. Our engineering organization includes multiple product application teams responsible for delivering core customer-facing capabilities.
We are seeking Staff Software Engineers to join our TQM team. You’ll work alongside other staff, senior, and early-career engineers to design, build, and scale backend and frontend systems that power enterprise-grade product workflows. This is an opportunity to work on complex product and data problems while contributing meaningfully to technical decisions, system quality, and team delivery.
We are low on meetings and high on accountability. Most of the team is in the EST time zone, with a few located in AST, PST, and Central as well.

What you’ll be doing   The TQM team builds the planning layer of Forma.ai ’s platform. TQM stands for Territory and Quota Management. Sales operations teams use it to plan the deployment of large scale sales organizations: divide their target market among sellers, set and communicate targets, and manage changes during the year. Commissions, crediting, and reporting all depend on our data.
We build with AI tools every day, so writing code is rarely what slows us down. What matters more is how often a person makes the right call. For the staff role at Forma, that means strong product judgement as well strong technical judgement. You will decide what problem to solve, which customer request shows a real pattern and which is a one-off, how to actually build and deliver software at a high velocity in the new AI world, and how to build a system will hold up for years.

The team’s direction will depend heavily on how well you make those calls.
You will:
Lead the design of TQM’s enterprise features, including permissions, audit history, and approval workflows.
You care about the product experience, working on both frontend and backend towards the goal of delivering strong experiences.
Design these features so that new product areas can use them without rebuilding them.
Learn from customers how planning is governed inside their organizations and turn that into a clear plan for delivery.
Decide what not to build. Cut scope that doesn’t serve a customer, and say so clearly.
Set the technical direction for how these features connect to the rest of the Forma.ai platform.
Write the design documents and decision records that the team builds from, and review others’ with a high bar.
Stay hands-on. Build the hardest parts yourself and make sure the result works in production.
Contribute heavily to product ideation discussions, and bring opinions.
What we’re looking for    Extensive experience building and running production systems, including leading the design of a product area or platform.
Proficiency in Kotlin, Java, or a similar language, and comfort working across the stack, including a Type Script and React frontend.
Strong SQL, relational schema design, and data modelling skills, including data models that had to change over many years.
A track record of good technical judgement. You can describe major decisions, what you rejected, and how they held up.
A track record of good product judgement. You have shaped what was built, and you can explain how you weighed customer value,…