{"id":2347876,"url":"https://alion.io/job/foratravel-seniorstaff-full-stack-engineer-applied-ai","title":"Senior/Staff Full Stack Engineer, Applied AI","company":{"id":673032,"name":"Foratravel","domain":"foratravel.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/foratravel","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"C","score":66,"open_postings":34,"ghost_share":0.559,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["New York, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":167000,"max_usd":311000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":1432},"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Angular","optional":false},{"name":"Anthropic","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Celery","optional":false},{"name":"Django","optional":false},{"name":"Flask","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RabbitMQ","optional":false},{"name":"React.js","optional":false},{"name":"Redis","optional":false},{"name":"Structured Outputs","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false},{"name":"Vue.js","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-04T14:38:58Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-15","last_verified_at":"2026-10-20T17:47:55Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":138,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":137},"description":"About Fora\nFora 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.\nWe'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. That's not just a philosophy about our product, it's how we build our team. Everyone at Fora gets hands-on with frontier AI tooling as part of the job. At Fora, you'll learn to be AI-fluent, with real experience applying AI to solve problems day to day, wherever you sit in the company. \nFounded in 2021, Fora has grown to a team of 250+ 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).\nCome build something that hasn't existed before.\nAbout The Role\nWe’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 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.\nMost 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. \nThis 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.\nKey Responsibilities\nPartner with the team’s Product Manager and Designer to define and prioritize Fora’s Applied AI roadmap, turning ambiguous goals into shippable agent capabilities\nHelp 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\nBuild 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\nContinue 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\nFocus on performance, latency, architecture, and clean code - advisors feel every millisecond of a streamed response and every wrong tool call\nCollaborate with engineers across the company to define end-to-end solutions that span the AI services, the core Django platform, and our portal frontend\nTake features from 0 → 1, owning an entire solution from design to implementation to delivery and beyond\nHelp establish the patterns, primitives, and best practices for Applied AI at Fora as the teams surface area grows\nRequirements\nBachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience\n5+ years of experience in backend and frontend development\n3+ years experience using React / Vue.js / Angular.io\n3+ years experience with Python, using Django / Flask / Alternative\nExperience building stateful and event-driven web applications\nExperience testing web applications\nHigh API and distributed-systems design skills, with strong fundamentals in relational databases and ORMs\nGenuine curiosity and drive to go deep on applied AI - you're excited to spend your days making agents impactful, but reliable; you learn fast in a field that changes month-to-month or even day-to-day\nAbility to be a team player, with strong communication and collaboration skills\nAn entrepreneurial mindset and comfort with ambiguity and fast iteration\nStrongly Preferred\nHands-on experience shipping LLM-powered features in production - MCP tools, agentic loops, structured outputs, streaming (SSE), prompt design, retrieval, evals\nFamiliarity with the modern agent stack: the Model Context Protocol (MCP), LLM provider SDKs (e.g., Anthropic, OpenAI), and agent / eval frameworks\nExperience designing evaluation and observability for non-deterministic AI systems (offline evals, LLM-as-judge, tracing, prompt / version tracking)\nDaily use of AI coding tools as part of how you build\nExperience with async task and streaming infrastructure (Celery, Redis, RabbitMQ, or similar)\nAWS experience\nKubernetes experience\nCompensation\nCompensation 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.\nOther benefits include:\nUnlimited vacation\nHealth Insurance (including an option completely covered by Fora HQ)\nDental & Vision Insurance\nWellhub Memberships\n401k plan with company match\nCommuter Benefits\nSupplemental Life Insurance\nStock Options\nThis 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). \nOur Values\nWe’re forging our own path\nFora has always been about driving change within the industry. We’re not interested in maintaining the status quo. \nWe’re stronger together\nCommunity 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.\nWe believe in technology\nWe 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.\nWe’re here to serve\nWe 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.\nWe mean business\nFora 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.\nWORK AUTHORIZATION\nAuthorization 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.\nEQUAL OPPORTUNITY\nFora is committed to an equitable hiring process and an inclusive work environment. BIPOC and traditionally underrepresented candidates are strongly encouraged to apply. 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