Staff Engineer, R&D AI Tooling

Job description

Every engineer at Tern builds with AI. AI adoption and fluency is demanded, and is world class across the entire org. If you'd rather design from a distance, or build ahead of everyone in isolation rather than teach and pair, this isn't the right fit. If you're the person who has been the top 1% on agentic workflows for a while and you're hungry to build the team around you into something genuinely exceptional at this, we want to 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. STAFF ENGINEER, R&D AI TOOLING Every team at Tern is an AI team. We run Claude Code with a deep library of custom skills and agents, unlimited token usage, and we're actively building agentic and MCP, based tooling on top of our own systems. It's working. This role is the person who pushes it dramatically further. We're looking for a staff-level engineer who is demonstrably ahead of most teams on agentic development, not in theory, in production. You'll ship real engineering work in the main codebase every week, and from inside that work, build the tooling and workflows that make the entire team faster. The direction you set comes from having your hands on the same problems as the rest of the team. This isn't an architecture role you earn by being right in meetings. The credibility and the tooling both come from being in the work. If you'd rather design from a distance, or build ahead of everyone in isolation rather than teach and pair, this isn't the right fit. If you're the person who has been ahead on agentic workflows for a while and you're hungry to build the team around you into something genuinely exceptional at this, we want to talk. WHY TERN? Tern is building the platform travel advisors run their entire business on, and we believe the next great aggregator in travel gets built right now, on AI. The window to win this market is open, and we intend to take it. With capital and real momentum behind us, we're growing the engineering team this summer to put fuel behind what's already working. This role owns a real part of how Tern works, the kind of work the rest of the team depends on. We hire engineers with high agency and the trust to execute independently, set direction through their work, and lift the standard of everyone around them. We hire for proven execution, so we want to see specific evidence of what you've shipped and the impact it had, in your resume and in the room. ENGINEERING STANDARDS 1. Ship regularly. Every engineering pair ships a working, tested feature every week. Fast and good are not in tension. Testing is part of the build. 2. We own our code and how users experience it. We watch what we ship in production, stay close to support, AppSignal, Bugsnag, and Canny, and own our fixes end to end. 3. We make the people around us faster and better, through code and design reviews that teach, through clear written work, and by unblocking our colleagues quickly. 4. Every team is an AI team. We use AI fluently in daily work, from design review to test generation to debugging. We run Claude Code with a deep library of custom skills and agents, unlimited token usage, and we're actively building agentic and MCP-based tooling on top of our own systems. This is how we move fast and build well. OUR STACK Tern is a Ruby on Rails application with a Hotwire front end, backed by a Postgres database and hosted on Heroku, though we are migrating to Google Cloud Platform. Our data flows through to BigQuery, where we build reporting in Hex. Claude Code, with our own library of custom skills and agents, is part of daily development. You don't need to have used every piece, but you should be fluent enough to be productive quickly and excited to work this way. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Ship real engineering work every week in the same codebase and on the same problems as the rest of the team- your credibility and your tooling both come from being in the work - Accelerate and compound our R&D workflows: optimize day, to, day engineering, build and improve custom skills and agents, push toward fully agentic overnight workflows where they make sense - Tackle the bottlenecks that cap autonomous throughput today, including code review, so more work can run reliably without a human in the loop - Train and certify engineers on new workflows so improvements actually land rather than sitting on a shelf - Treat teaching and building in the open as a primary part of the job, not a tax on it - Level up the team's evals, tooling, and prompt engineering practices from the inside out WHAT YOU HAVE - Agentic development fluency: Staff or principal background at an AI-native company that has genuinely figured out agentic workflows. Specific things you've shipped, MCP integrations, custom agents, eval frameworks, codegen pipelines, not slides about it. - Public signal: You write or build in the open on agentic patterns, MCP, evals, or codegen. People in this space already follow your work. If we've heard of you and are following your work, we want to talk. - Current individual shipping record: You earn the right to set the bar by being excellent at the work and staying in it. You do not want to step back from shipping. - AI fluency with judgment: You use AI to move dramatically faster while questioning its assumptions. You know when output looks right but isn't, and you build systems that catch it. - Leveling instinct: You're genuinely excited about bringing the team along, not just building ahead of everyone. Navigating that gap, with real excitement about it, is something you've done before. BONUS POINTS - Built developer tooling or internal platforms at scale - Experience with MCP server development or Claude Code integrations - Ruby on Rails background, or shipped in a comparable stack 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. 👂 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. HOW WE HIRE - Our interview is built to surface demonstrated execution, and we keep it deliberately light rather than a long gauntlet - We screen resumes for specific, verifiable things you shipped and the impact they had, not responsibilities or titles - We go deep on one or two things you personally built and shipped. We want the real story: the ambiguity, the dead ends, what broke, and how you owned the fix. - We give a practical exercise that reflects the actual work, with AI tools available and expected - And throughout, we look for evidence that working with you made other engineers better at their jobs We take the work seriously, not ourselves. If you're here to grow, build something industry-changing, and raise the bar for the people around you, we'd love to meet you. 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 how an entire engineering org approaches agentic development - 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.