AI Engineer

About the Role

We’re looking for a seasoned AI Engineer to join us as we continue to build Fora’s products and infrastructure. Our ideal candidate is someone who understands our mission & brand, is excited about what we’re creating, and is passionate about supercharging our advisors and our HQ team with AI! The work for this role will touch all aspects of our technology stack including our advisor portal, external-facing website, content and supplier systems, internal admin tools, and external integrations.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with AI Leadership, Product Managers, Engineers and Designers to brainstorm and build new features for our travel advisor platform
• Rapidly build prototypes to test product hypotheses in days
• Continuously improve existing AI products leverage new models, tools, and prompting techniques
• Stay up-to-date on the latest developments and advancements in AI research and industry
• Research and evaluate third-party vendors to guide build vs buy decisions
• Create clear AI Engineering specifications based on product requirements
• Communicate and explain your work to peers and stakeholders on a daily basis
• Navigate and make decisions in situations of ambiguity or uncertainty

Requirements

• Masters degree or PhD in computer science, AI/ML, computational linguistics, engineering, data science, mathematics, or related fields
• 5+ years of proven experience in AI/ML engineering, building AI systems and services, applying machine learning models to solving real-world business problems.
• Experience implementing LLM-based generative AI systems in producwith a range commercial and open foundation models (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta)
• Demonstrated ability to optimize generative AI applications for latency and cost efficiency
• Proven experience building and applying machine learning models to real-world business applications.
• Strong proficiency in NLP, machine learning models and prompt engineering techniques
• Demonstrated experience building production-grade RAG systems utilizing structured, unstructured, and graph data.
• Experience evaluating a range of AI, NLP and ML systems (LLMs, RAG, search, classical models), including training data collection, human labeling and model-based techniques
• Experience designing, building and supporting APIs to be used by other engineering teams
• Familiarity with information retrieval systems, search algorithms, vector databases and embeddings
• Proven track record to innovate and deliver results at scale.
• The ability to write understandable, testable code with an eye towards maintainability.
• Excellent communication skills and you are capable of explaining sophisticated technical concepts to cross-functional collaborators with a wide range of technical and non-technical backgrounds, including product managers, engineers, and executive stakeholders 
• Strong computer science fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, data engineering, programming languages, and information retrieval.
• Solid background in a wide range of classical ML approaches
• Experience developing conversational AI systems
• Exceptional problem-solving skills and enthusiasm for tackling complex, unsolved problems
• Demonstrated track record of cultivating strong working relationships and driving collaboration across multiple technical and business teams.
• Excited about developing domain expertise in the travel industry through work with subject matter experts, travel advisors and product experts

Nice to Have

• Experience building agentic systems
• Knowledge of fine-tuning and leveraging small language models to optimize latency in complex LLM-driven architectures

Compensation

Salary Range: $150-200k + equity. Other benefits include:

• Unlimited vacation
• Ability to book travel for yourself, friends and family and earn the commission like an advisor
• Hybrid work environment, with two fully remote weeks encouraged
• Regular travel-related team events
• Health Insurance (including an option completely covered by Fora HQ)
• Dental & Vision Insurance
• ClassPass Memberships
• 401k plan
• Commuter Benefits
• Stock Options

This 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).