Staff Engineer, R&D AI Tooling

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.