Senior/Staff Backend Engineer, Applied AI

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 & Benefits

• Indicative range of $155K–$225K + equity
• 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