Senior/Staff Backend Engineer, Finance

About Fora Fora is the modern travel agency , 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 business-in-a-box platform gives travel entrepreneurs everything they need to launch and scale, from cutting-edge tools and personalized training to a vibrant community and exclusive industry partnerships. 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. We believe that everyone, from seasoned professionals to first-time advisors, can build something both profitable and personal. Founded in 2021 by seasoned entrepreneurs, Fora has grown steadily since, expanding to a team of 200+ full-time employees based in downtown New York City . In 2025, we announced our $60 million Series B and C investment rounds , led by Thrive Capital and Insight Partners , with participation by previous investors including Forerunner and Heartcore Capital. We've also been recognized as a LinkedIn Top Startup 2024, Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies 2025 and 2023, and Built In 2025 Best Places to Work. 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. About The Role We’re looking for a seasoned Senior/Staff Backend Engineer to join the Finance Pod, which builds and maintains the complex systems that power advisor payments at Fora. This pod owns the end-to-end advisor payment system and experience (covering booking data ingestion, commission collection, and payouts), and is expanding quickly into new fintech and payment products. In this role, you’ll design and implement scalable systems that ensure payouts are fast, accurate, and transparent, while collaborating with Product and Ops to bring financial data to life in the Advisor Portal and internal tools. You’ll help build and evolve services that handle booking ingestion, payout logic, reconciliation, and integrations with payment processors like Stripe. Example projects include building smart visualizations for the Payments page, shaping our traveler invoicing experience, building payout statuses and notifications, and integrating with new financial platforms and services. Our ideal candidate is someone who understands our mission and is excited to shape how thousands of travel entrepreneurs get paid—bringing an eye for user experience, data integrity, and trust to every interaction involving money movement. Key Responsibilities Partner with Product Managers and Designers to define and prioritize the roadmap for advisor payments, commission earnings, and revenue systems Design and maintain distributed systems that process booking, payment, and reconciliation data at scale Build and optimize backend services that power payout logic, transaction timing, ledger accuracy, and integrations with third-party payment platforms Focus on performance, architecture, data modeling, and transactional reliability in all systems you own Collaborate with other engineers to define end-to-end engineering solutions that connect frontend experiences with secure, verifiable backend processes Own epics and be responsible for the full solution—design, implementation, and delivery Requirements Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience 5+ years experience in backend web development 3+ years experience with Python, using Django / Flask / equivalent frameworks Strong experience designing APIs and distributed systems that handle financial or transactional data Experience with relational databases, ORMs, and data models that support accounting or ledger-based workflows Background in FinTech, Payments, or Infrastructure—especially systems involving reconciliation, d