Senior/ Staff Platform Engineer

About The Role

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.

Key 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.

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

Strongly Preferred

• Experience with high-traffic B2B2C platforms or marketplace architectures.

Compensation

Compensation for this role varies based on experience, with an indicative range of $155K–$225K + equity. Final compensation will depend on the level at which the candidate is hired, as we’re considering multiple levels for this role.

• Unlimited vacation
• Health Insurance (including an option completely covered by Fora HQ)
• Dental & Vision Insurance
• Wellhub Memberships
• 401k plan with company match
• Commuter Benefits
• Supplemental Life Insurance
• Stock Options

This role is based in New York City with a hybrid WFH & office schedule (Monday, Tuesday and Thursday are our Tribeca in-office days, with flexibility for Wednesday and Friday at your preference).