Senior Software Engineer

Senior Supplier Integration Engineer

Tern's growth runs through bookable inventory. Every supplier integration we add expands what advisors can book without leaving the app and every integration that runs reliably earns their trust. We're staffing the integrations squad to move fast on cruise, lodging, and insurance partners, and this role is a core builder on that team.

You'll own integrations end to end, from the first API conversation through production monitoring, working alongside our integration lead. This isn't about following a spec. You'll take an underdocumented API and turn it into something Tern can depend on: reliable, observable, and ready for advisors to book through.

This is a player role on a small, focused squad. You'll ship every week, own your work in production, and contribute to the patterns and tooling that make the next integration faster.

At Tern, we believe in small business. We believe in the power of travel. And we're building the future of both.

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

• Own supplier integrations from design through production, including the realities of third-party APIs: undocumented behavior, rate limits, inconsistent data, and partners who change things without warning

• Ship working, tested integration features every week, broken into the smallest shippable pieces

• Contribute to the abstractions, tooling, and AI-assisted workflows that make each new integration faster than the last

• Watch your integrations in production and catch failures before advisors do

• Make the engineers around you better through code reviews that teach and context shared early

What You Have

• Integration ownership: Track record of personally shipping and owning integrations with external systems and third-party APIs. Real stories about what broke, how you found it, and how you fixed it for good.

• High agency: You've taken ambiguous, under specified problems and driven them to a working outcome without someone managing the steps. You don't wait for fully specified tickets.

• Reliability instincts: You think in failure modes, retries, idempotency, and observability by default. Turning unreliable, poorly documented external APIs into something dependable is work you've done before.

• AI in your daily workflow: Specific examples of where AI made your work faster or better, with the judgment to question its output rather than ship it wholesale.

Bonus Points

• Experience with travel industry APIs: GDS, booking systems, supplier data feeds

• Background at a company where the core work was external API integrations

• Comfortable in Ruby on Rails or a comparable MVC 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.

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.

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 our engineering approach 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.