Staff Engineer, R&D AI Tooling

Responsibilities

• 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 au

Additional Information

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 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. 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. 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. 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.

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