Senior/Staff Full Stack Engineer, Applied AI

Fora is the modern travel agency, empowering anyone with a passion for travel to build a thriving advisory business. We're modernizing the $100B+ travel agency industry by combining powerful technology, data, and community to enable thousands of entrepreneurs to build on our platform. Our business-in-a-box platform gives travel entrepreneurs everything they need to launch and scale, from cutting-edge tools and personalized training to a vibrant community and exclusive industry partnerships. 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.

About the role

We’re looking for a seasoned Senior / Staff Full Stack Engineer to help build Fora’s fast-growing suite of AI-driven products and infrastructure. Our ideal candidate follows AI closely, can evaluate models and frameworks, and has built, shipped, triaged, and optimized LLM-powered systems in production or on the side. You’ll work in ambiguity, on top of APIs and SDKs that change frequently.

Most travel agents can’t scale past $1M/year in business before needing their first hire. By giving advisors a day-one AI 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 automates time-consuming tasks so advisors can move faster, stay organized, and gain insights into their business—freeing them to focus on building client relationships, curating 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
• Developing evaluations and observability to confidently ship changes to a non-deterministic system

Responsibilities

• Partner with the Product Manager and Designer to define and prioritize Fora’s Applied AI roadmap, turning ambiguous goals into shippable agent capabilities
• Design and build MCP tooling—exposing Fora’s data and service layers through permission-aware tools that agents can call on an advisor’s behalf, with guardrails to ensure actions are taken on the right data at the right time
• Build and harden our agent orchestration, including tool-calling loops, streaming responses, multi-step workflows, retries, guardrails, and contracts between the advisor portal and AI service
• Improve the reliability of non-deterministic systems by designing evals, regression suites, tracing, and logging to measure quality, catch tool-call drift, and ship prompt/model/tool changes with less risk
• Optimize 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 spanning AI services, the core Django platform, and our portal frontend
• Take features from 0 → 1, owning entire solutions from design to implementation to delivery
• Establish patterns, primitives, and best practices for Applied AI at Fora as the team’s surface area grows

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years of experience in backend and frontend development
• 3+ years of experience with React, Vue.js, or Angular.io
• 3+ years of experience with Python, using Django, Flask, or similar frameworks
• Experience building stateful and event-driven web applications
• Experience testing web applications
• Strong API and distributed-systems design skills, with expertise in relational databases and ORMs
• Genuine curiosity and drive to go deep on applied AI—excited to spend your days making agents impactful yet reliable in a fast-changing field
• Ability to be a team player with strong communication and collaboration skills
• 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, prompt design, retrieval, evals)
• Familiarity with the modern agent stack: 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 your workflow
• Experience with async task and streaming infrastructure (Celery, Redis, RabbitMQ, or similar)
• AWS experience
• Kubernetes experience

Benefits

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

Pay

Compensation for this role varies based on experience, with an indicative range of $180K–$225K + equity. Final compensation will depend on the level at which the candidate is hired, as we’re considering multiple levels for this role.

Schedule

This role is based in New York City with a hybrid WFH & office schedule (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday are in-office days in Tribeca; Wednesday and Friday are flexible).

Values

• We’re forging our own path: Fora drives change within the industry. We’re not interested in maintaining the status quo.
• We’re stronger together: Community is our cornerstone. We believe collective power unlocks better opportunities and outcomes for advisors, partners, and travelers.
• We believe in technology: Technology addresses fundamental challenges in the travel industry. Advancements in AI, bold platform investments, and world-class data infrastructure transform advisor workflows and travel experiences.
• We’re here to serve: We operate in service of our community. When advisors are empowered to focus on what they do best, we all win.
• We mean business: Fora balances fun, meaningful work, and serious travel business. We unlock opportunities for travel entrepreneurs, deliver high-quality guests at scale, and provide superior travel experiences.

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 the U.S. are not subject to this requirement.