[Hiring] Staff Engineer, R&D AI Tooling @Tern Travel

Role 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. 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. Qualifications Agentic development fluency: Staff or principal background at an AI-native company that has genuinely figured out agentic workflows. Public signal: You write or build in the open on agentic patterns, MCP, evals, or codegen. Current individual shipping record: You earn the right to set the bar by being excellent at the work and staying in it. AI fluency with judgment: You use AI to move dramatically faster while questioning its assumptions. Leveling instinct: You're genuinely excited about bringing the team along, not just building ahead of everyone. 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. 🧭 We act with optimistic agency. 💪 We expect operational excellence. 👂 We deeply understand our users. ➕ We embrace the power of and, and not now. 📣 We speak up and move forward. 🏃 We move fast and sweat the details. 🤣 We take the work seriously, but not ourselves. 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. 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.