Senior/Staff Backend Engineer, Applied AI

The role

This person will build and expand AI-driven products and infrastructure, including MCP tools and agent orchestration. They will work on the AI stack to improve reliability, performance, and latency for the advisor portal.

What you will do

• Partner with Product Manager and Designer to define the Applied AI roadmap
• Design and build MCP tooling to expose data and service layers
• Build and harden agent orchestration including tool-calling loops and multi-step workflows
• Improve reliability of non-deterministic systems through evals, tracing, and logging
• Focus on performance, latency, architecture, and clean code
• Collaborate with engineers to define end-to-end solutions
• Take features from 0 to 1 from design to implementation and delivery
• Establish patterns, primitives, and best practices for Applied AI

Required qualifications

• 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
• 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
• Strong communication and collaboration skills
• An entrepreneurial mindset and comfort with ambiguity and fast iteration

Nice to have

• 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

Benefits

• 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

Before you apply

• 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

About the company

Fora is a modern travel agency empowering entrepreneurs to build travel advisory businesses. They use AI to modernize the travel industry and support a community of advisors.