Sr Software Engineer

Forward is scaling its engineering platform and building systems that support product, AI, and payments capabilities. The Senior Software Engineer will deliver full-stack features, develop agentic AI systems, operate real-time data pipelines, and improve platform scalability, security, compliance, and reliability.

Responsibilities:

• Architect, build, and maintain full-stack applications using TypeScript, Next.js, React, and Node.js across our product surface area
• Own end-to-end feature delivery from database schema and API design through frontend UI/UX, including observability, testing, and deployment
• Drive architectural decisions across the stack, balancing speed with long-term durability
• Design and implement agentic AI systems — autonomous agents that plan multi-step workflows, use tools, call APIs, and make decisions with minimal human oversight
• Lead the integration of LLM-powered capabilities into production systems — prompt engineering, tool-use frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and multi-agent orchestration
• Stand up and evolve AI platform infrastructure as the roadmap matures — model serving, orchestration, and evaluation pipelines
• Build and operate real-time streaming data pipelines using Kafka (or Kafka-compatible platforms like WarpStream), stream processors, and event-driven architectures
• Design event-driven data flows that feed both product and AI systems with low-latency data
• Tune Kafka performance, partitioning strategies, and consumer groups for throughput and reliability
• Contribute to scaling the platform from current load to the next order of magnitude — capacity planning, performance tuning, and resilience engineering
• Build and harden security-critical paths: authentication, authorization, secrets management, encryption, and data isolation
• Improve operational maturity — observability, alerting, incident response, and on-call practices that keep a payments platform reliable
• Help advance compliance posture (PCI DSS, SOC 2) by building the controls, audit trails, and tooling regulated environments require