Fora is a travel agency platform that enables people to become travel agents and connects travelers with advisors.
<div class="content-intro"><h2><strong>About Fora</strong></h2> <p>Fora is the <strong>modern travel agency</strong>, 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 <strong>business-in-a-box platform </strong>gives travel entrepreneurs everything they need to launch and scale, from cutting-edge tools and personalized training to a <strong>vibrant community </strong>and exclusive industry partnerships. At the heart of it all is <strong>our mission: to help the next generation of travel entrepreneurs turn their love for travel into a fulfilling career</strong>, whether full-time or part-time. We believe that everyone, from seasoned professionals to first-time advisors, can build something both profitable and personal.</p> <p>Founded in 2021 by seasoned entrepreneurs, Fora has grown steadily since, expanding to a team of <strong>200+ full-time employees</strong> based in downtown <strong>New York City</strong>. <strong>In 2026,</strong> we announced our <strong>$60 million Series D investment round</strong>, led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures, with continued participation from existing investors Thrive Capital, Insight Partners, and Heartcore Capital. We've also been recognized as a LinkedIn Top Startup 2024, Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies 2025 and 2023, and we were most recently recognized as one of the TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2026.</p> <p>We're building the first truly unified platform for all travel needs—leveraging the best of human expertise and technology to transform how people plan and book travel.</p> <p> </p></div><h2><strong>About The Role</strong></h2> <p>We’re looking for an experienced Senior/Staff Software engineer to lead and scale the foundational systems that power Fora’s platform. In this role, you’ll own the reliability, scalability, and developer experience of our infrastructure — including CI/CD pipelines, cloud architecture, observability systems, and core platform security. You’ll partner closely with Engineering, and cross-functional stakeholders to ensure our systems are fast, secure, and built to scale with our business.</p> <p>Our ideal candidate is a mission-aligned leader with a strong track record of building high scale and secure platforms, an understanding of devops, data pipelines and distributed systems, and a passion for scaling both products and teams.</p> <h2><strong>Key Responsibilities</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Optimize database performance and reliability, managing PostgreSQL configurations, connection pooling, timeout settings, and query performance at scale.</li> <li>Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that enable rapid, safe deployments with progressive rollout capabilities and automated rollback mechanisms.</li> <li>Manage message queue infrastructure including RabbitMQ and Celery workers, ensuring optimal throughput and preventing memory pressure issues.</li> <li>Build developer tools and platforms that accelerate engineering velocity, including feature flag systems, development environments, and debugging tools.</li> <li>Implement infrastructure as code using Terraform, ensuring all infrastructure changes are versioned, reviewed, and reproducible.</li> <li>Architect and implement monitoring and observability solutions using Datadog, CloudWatch, and custom metrics to ensure comprehensive system visibility.</li> <li>Drive security and compliance initiatives, including secrets management, network segmentation.</li> <li>Partner with engineering teams to establish SLOs, implement proper error budgets, and ensure services meet reliability targets.</li> <li>Design and maintain our container orchestration layer, bonus if familiar with Kubernetes.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Requirements</strong></h2> <ul> <li>5+ years of experience in engineering, at least 2 in platform engineering</li> <li>Strong experience with AWS services (EKS, RDS, ALB/ELB, SQS, CloudWatch, IAM)</li> <li>Proven track record with infrastructure as code tools (Terraform preferred)</li> <li>Experience with PostgreSQL administration including performance tuning, replication, and connection management</li> <li>Experience with message queue systems (RabbitMQ, Kafka, Celery, or similar)</li> <li>Proficiency with monitoring and observability tools (Datadog, Prometheus, or similar APM solutions)</li> <li>Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, feature flags)</li> <li>Understanding of security best practices including secrets management, network security, and compliance requirements</li> <li>Expertise with container orchestration in production environments, including cluster management, networking, and troubleshooting (Kubernetes preferred)</li> <li>Excellent communication skills with ability to explain complex infrastructure concepts to diverse audiences</li> <li>Experience with cost optimization and capacity planning for cloud infrastructure</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Strongly Preferred</strong></h3> <ul> <li>Experience with high-traffic B2B2C platforms or marketplace architectures.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Compensation</strong></h2> <p>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.</p> <ul> <li>Unlimited vacation</li> <li>Health Insurance (including an option completely covered by Fora HQ)</li> <li>Dental & Vision Insurance</li> <li>Wellhub Memberships</li> <li>401k plan with company match</li> <li>Commuter Benefits</li> <li>Supplemental Life Insurance</li> <li>Stock Options</li> </ul> <p>This role is based in New York City with a hybrid WFH & office schedule (Monday, Tuesday and Thursday are our Tribeca in-office days,