What's the Company Culture Like at Fora?

What stuck out to you the most about Fora’s culture during the hiring process, and what was it specifically that convinced you to join?

The most prevalent thing that stood out to me was the genuine sense of excitement about what the team was building. The positive energy I got from everyone I interviewed with, from management and leadership to other engineers, made it easy to see myself working there. Eight months into my time here has proven that instinct correct. It’s been great! Fora is very family-friendly and growing fast, and I’m excited to come in to work each day.

How does the company culture encourage peers to connect with each other either virtually, in person or both?

Our company culture at Fora really lends itself to building connections with my coworkers. Our pod team structure encourages cross-functional communication naturally with designers, engineers and product managers working closely together to build the right things at the right time for our users. Our hybrid setup — currently three days in the office for engineers — has allowed me to get a lot of the benefits of in-office relationship-building and additional awareness of problems that people are solving that I was missing out on while being fully remote. I’ve been able to get people unblocked just by overhearing a conversation, which never happened during my years of fully remote work. 

Beyond our day-to-day work, we also have company offsites, happy hours and other activities that really allow us to connect and hang out as well. We recently had a team cooking class at a pasta-making studio in Greenwich Village, and I’m looking forward to putting the cooking class skills to use this winter.

What opportunities are available for employees to level up their careers?

Fora has a very strong demo culture, with weekly product and tech meetings where anyone can showcase their work to leadership and the rest of the org and take questions. We also have a robust hackathon culture, with hackathons occurring a few times per year. You get to work with people from other teams or areas of the business you don’t normally interact with, tackle problems outside your usual domain, and pitch ideas to the company. Several hackathon projects have made it into production since I joined, which makes you feel like there’s no limit to what you can come up with to solve real problems for the company and our users. 

I attended a conference earlier this year as a representative and brought back hands-on knowledge about feature flagging and AI agent implementation that I’ve directly applied to my work. The company’s willingness to invest in conference attendance shows they value continuous learning and bringing new ideas back to the team. At a fast-growing company like Fora, there are lots of interesting problems to solve, from engineering to organizational ones. The travel industry specifically is changing quickly with AI, and it’s exciting to be bringing new capabilities to our users.