Forward Deployed Integration Engineer

Job description

Tern can sign agencies faster than it can bring them on. The bottleneck isn't sales, it's that every migration still leans on manual work that should be a tool. If turning slow, repetitive, error-prone processes into infrastructure that just runs sounds deeply satisfying, let's talk. ABOUT TERN Tern is a venture-backed software company on a mission to reshape the $127B travel agency industry by giving power back to the entrepreneurs who built it. Nearly 98% of travel agencies are small businesses. These businesses have been chronically underserved by technology. We're here to change that. Our platform helps travel advisors run more efficient, professional, and profitable operations, giving them the modern infrastructure they need to lead the next chapter of travel. But the impact goes beyond business. Travel advisors help clients move more intentionally through the world. When a traveler works with an advisor, they're more likely to avoid overtouristed hotspots and more likely to spend their dollars in places where they can do real good. That's the kind of travel we want more of. At Tern, we believe in small business. We believe in the power of travel. And we're building the future of both. FORWARD DEPLOYED INTEGRATION ENGINEER We think AI has changed what a migration can be. The work that used to mean cleaning data by hand, babysitting syncs, and fixing the same problem one record at a time is becoming something a small team can run at scale. You'd be at the front of that. This is a chance to define what data migration looks like in an AI world, not to maintain how it worked in the old one. You'd sit with our customer-facing implementation team and own the full migration, from the first look at an agency's legacy systems to the moment their data is live and reconciled in Tern. This is a forward deployed role. You'll be in the real mess of a customer's data, piecing together an itinerary builder, a back-office accounting system, and a reporting platform that were never built to talk to each other. You have two jobs, and they feed each other. First, get each agency migrated and reconciled. The numbers in Tern match the numbers in the old system exactly, and you get there fast. Migration is the one thing standing between a signed agency and a producing one, so speed here is growth. Second, build the system that makes the next migration faster than the last. You'll work with a team already leading on this, combining deterministic tooling with AI-native onboarding to turn a handful of agencies a week into many a day. Most companies are still doing this by hand. We're building the version that doesn't have to. If you want to define a category rather than inherit one, this is the seat. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own end-to-end migrations for real agencies alongside the implementation team: pull data from itinerary builders, back-office accounting systems, and reporting platforms, and land it clean in Tern - Build the reconciliation layer that proves, penny for penny, that Tern matches the source, and surfaces every discrepancy before the customer does - Combine deterministic tooling and AI to collapse the manual work in a migration, so the team onboards far more agencies without adding people - Own and harden the partner-network sync infrastructure and one-way agency syncs: keep advisor data flowing reliably, catch the cases where syncs silently drift, and bring fragile no-code flows in-house as maintainable code - Consolidate scattered, per-integration logic into shared infrastructure so changes propagate the same way everywhere instead of failing quietly - Keep the pipeline fast, idempotent, and safe at the volumes scaling demands WHAT YOU HAVE - Backend and data-pipeline engineering. Strong in a backend stack and SQL, with real experience building data pipelines and background-job systems that run reliably at volume. We're Rails, Sidekiq, dbt, and BigQuery. - An AI-native way of working. You already reach for AI to move faster, and you have a point of view on where it belongs in a data pipeline and where determinism has to win. You're excited to build in a space that's being defined right now, not one that's already settled. - Reconciliation rigor. You don't call a migration done because the rows moved. You call it done when you can prove the target matches the source, and you're the kind of person who hunts down the 1 record in 10,000 that's off. - Comfort in front of customers. You can sit with a non-technical teammate or an agency owner, understand their data and their anxieties, and turn both into a plan. Being close to the customer is an advantage to you, not a distraction from real engineering. - Tooling that lasts. You've taken a manual, repetitive process and replaced it with tooling that got adopted and stayed adopted. You can show the before and the after. - Integration ownership. You've owned third-party integrations or syncs and kept them healthy. You understand drift, idempotency, fan-out, and why "something changed, re-sync it" is harder than it sounds. - High agency. You take a planned backlog and execute without needing every ticket fully specced, and you surface the right trade-offs instead of quietly over-building. BONUS POINTS - Hands-on fluency with AI-assisted development tools (Cursor, Claude) to tighten the loop - Background in travel tech, CRM, or partner-network / back-office integrations - Experience retiring brittle no-code or Zapier-style flows into owned, maintainable code WHAT WE VALUE @ TERN 🌱 We're always leveling up. Whether you're deepening your craft, learning from a teammate, or embracing a new challenge, growth is core to our identity. 🧭 We act with optimistic agency. We take initiative, seek clarity, and move forward, even when the path isn't obvious. Through every peak and valley, we lead with curiosity, laughter, kindness, and resolve. 💪 We expect operational excellence. We ship value to our users every single week. We believe that compounding habits lead to sustainable productivity, consistency, and mutual trust. Operating Principles: 👂 We deeply understand our users. At every level of the organization, we obsess about understanding those we serve and the industry we operate in. ➕ We embrace the power of and, and not now. We challenge trade-offs by asking better questions. We break hard problems into small pieces and tackle them with intention. We also know to make the hard call to say "not right now". 📣 We speak up and move forward. Everyone at Tern has a voice and a responsibility to use it. We invite healthy tension, share dissenting views early, and challenge each other with curiosity, not ego. 🏃 We move fast and sweat the details. Velocity matters and relentless progress beats perfection every time. But speed isn't chaos: we stay aligned, own our outcomes, and care deeply about quality. 🤣 We take the work seriously, but not ourselves. We hire kind, driven people who elevate the room. If you've got a big ego or take yourself too seriously, you won't last. WHY THIS ROLE IS EXCITING There's a backlog of high-leverage infrastructure already scoped and waiting for an owner to take implementation from a handful of agencies a week toward many a day. You'd own it outright, and the impact is immediate: the systems you build touch real GMV, and Tern ships weekly, so what you write is live for advisors days later. The best part is the compounding. Every manual process you replace stops being a problem for good. Every integration you harden stops paging the team. Six months in, the machine runs faster than it did when you arrived, and you can point at exactly why. If you like building the quiet infrastructure that makes everything else possible, this is that role. WHY JOIN TERN? - Be part of a mission-driven team transforming the travel planning space - Work with a supportive, curious, and creative team - Influence and shape our user success strategy from the ground up - Competitive salary, equity, and benefits package Tern is committed to building a team that represents people from many different backgrounds and life experiences, reflecting our worldview coinciding with the users and customers we serve across the world. We prefer that you apply, so think of our postings as the start of the conversation. Take the chance- you may be a wonderful add to our Tern team, even if you don't fully match every requirement on the job description.