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.

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.

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.

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. 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. 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.

Tern is building the platform travel advisors run their entire business on, and we believe the next excellent aggregator in travel gets built right now, on AI. With capital and real momentum behind us, we're growing the engineering team this summer to put fuel behind what's already working.



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 # Ship regularly. Every engineering pair ships a working, tested feature every week. Testing is part of the build. # 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. # 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. 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. 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 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 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: Current individual shipping record: 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're genuinely excited about bringing the team along, not just building ahead of everyone. BONUS POINTS Ruby on Rails background, or shipped in a comparable stack We ship value to our users every single week.

At every level of the organization, we obsess about understanding those we serve and the industry we operate in. But speed isn't chaos: we stay aligned, own our outcomes, and care deeply about quality. 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 give a practical exercise that reflects the actual work, with AI tools available and expected 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.

📌 Staff Engineer, R&D AI Tooling (Dover)
🏢 Tern Travel
📍 Dover