Senior/Staff Backend Engineer, Applied AI

About Fora

Fora is the modern travel agency, empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs to build thriving travel advisory businesses. We're modernizing the $100B+ travel industry with AI woven through every part of the advisor's workflow, plus global supplier relationships, personalized training, and a vibrant community, all in one place. That's what lets advisors build businesses that scale, while their taste and service create trips no algorithm alone could plan. At the heart of it all is our mission: to help the next generation of travel entrepreneurs turn their love for travel into a fulfilling career, whether full-time or part-time.

The same idea shapes how we work. We're mission-driven and obsessed with our customers, and we believe humans and AI are both essential: the best work here comes from people and technology at their best, together.

Founded in 2021, Fora has grown to a team of 200+ full-time employees based in downtown New York City. In 2026, we closed a $60 million Series D led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures, with continued backing from Thrive Capital, Insight Partners, and Heartcore Capital. We've been named a LinkedIn Top Startup (2024), one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies (2023 and 2025), and one of TIME's 100 Most Influential Companies (2026).

Come build something that hasn't existed before.

About The Role

We’re looking for a seasoned Senior / Staff Backend Engineer to help build Fora’s fast growing suite of AI-driven products and infrastructure. Our ideal candidate is someone who follows AI closely and can tell which models and frameworks are worth using and which won’t last; has built, shipped, triaged, and optimized something that uses LLMs (in production or on the side); and has experience working in ambiguity, on top of APIs and SDKs that change every few weeks.

Most travel agents can’t scale past $1M / year in business before they need to make their first hire. By giving advisors a day-one assistant to delegate entire workflows to, we believe they should be able to solo-operate $100M / year businesses. Our current focus is on building Via, an AI co-pilot built into our advisor portal. Via takes on time-consuming tasks so advisors can move faster, stay more organized, and glean insights into their business that they couldn't ever before, freeing them to do what they love: building client relationships, curating unforgettable trips, and growing their business. 

This role tackles challenges across the AI stack including: Building and expanding our suite of MCP tools; tuning our agent harness and orchestration layer for quality, cost, and speed; and building evaluations and observability that let us ship changes to a non-deterministic system with confidence; and much much more.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner with the team’s Product Manager and Designer to define and prioritize Fora’s Applied AI roadmap, turning ambiguous goals into shippable agent capabilities
• Help design and build our MCP tooling – exposing Fora’s data and service layers through permission-aware MCP tools that agents can call on an advisor's behalf, with the proper guardrails in place so that we only ever act on the right data at the right time
• Build and harden our agent orchestration – tool-calling loops, streaming responses, multi-step workflows, retries and guardrails, and the contracts between Fora’s advisor portal and the AI service
• Continue improving the reliability of a non-deterministic system by designing evals, regression suites, tracing, and logging event metrics so we can measure quality, catch tool-call drift, and ship prompt, model, and tool changes with less risk
• Focus on performance, latency, architecture, and clean code – advisors feel every millisecond of a streamed response and every wrong tool call
• Collaborate with engineers across the company to define end-to-end solutions that span the AI services, the core Django platform, and our portal frontend
• Take features from 0 1, owning an entire solution from design to implementation to delivery and beyond
• Help establish the patterns, primitives, and best practices for Applied AI at Fora as the teams surface area grows

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years experience in backend web development
• 3+ years experience with Python, using Django / Flask / Alternative
• High API and distributed-systems design skills, with strong fundamentals in relational databases and ORMs
• Genuine curiosity and drive to go deep and stay up to date on applied AI
• Ability to be a team player, with strong communication and collaboration skills
• An entrepreneurial mindset and comfort with ambiguity and fast iteration

Strongly Preferred

• Hands-on experience shipping LLM-powered features in production: MCP tools, agentic loops, structured outputs, streaming (SSE), prompt design, retrieval, evals
• Familiarity with the modern agent stack: the Model Context Protocol (MCP), LLM provider SDKs (e.g., Anthropic, OpenAI), and agent / eval frameworks
• Experience designing evaluation and observability for non-deterministic AI systems (offline evals, LLM-as-judge, tracing, prompt / version tracking)
• Daily use of AI coding tools as part of how you build
• Experience with async task and streaming infrastructure (Celery, RabbitMQ, or similar)
• AWS experience
• Kubernetes experience

Compensation

Compensation for this role ranges from $185K to $235K + equity, based on the level at which a candidate is hired. Each level has a single standardized compensation figure, and the level offered is determined by performance across the interview process.

• 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). 

Our Values

We’re forging our own path

Fora has always been about driving change within the industry. We’re not interested in maintaining the status quo. 

We’re stronger together

Community is our cornerstone and collective power is our strength. We believe we can all go further when we operate together, using our combined leverage to unlock better opportunities and outcomes for our advisors, partners, and travelers.

We believe in technology

We believe technology is an answer to some of the most fundamental challenges the travel industry faces. We believe advancements in AI, bold investments in our platforms, and a world-class data infrastructure will transform the work of our advisors and our partners, while creating better travel experiences for travelers.

We’re here to serve

We operate in service of our community and believe that when they’re empowered to focus on what they do best, we all win. It’s why we relentlessly advocate for our advisors and prioritize their best interest every step of the way.

We mean business

Fora is equal parts fun, meaningful work and serious travel business. We’re unlocking opportunities for thousands of travel entrepreneurs, delivering a stream of high-quality guests at scale for our partners, and providing a superior travel experience for our travelers. It’s a better equation for the future of our industry.

WORK AUTHORIZATION

Authorization to work in the United States is required for full-time roles based in our New York City office. Fora is unable to sponsor or assist with U.S. work authorization. Roles based outside of the United States are not subject to this requirement.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

Fora is committed to an equitable hiring process and an inclusive work environment. BIPOC and traditionally underrepresented candidates are strongly encouraged to apply. We will not discriminate and will take action to ensure against discrimination in employment, recruitment, advertisements for employment, compensation, termination, upgrading, promotions, and other conditions of employment against any employee or job applicant on the bases of race, color, gender, national origin, age, religion, creed, disability, veteran's status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression or any other characteristic protected by law.