Senior Software Engineer

Job Description

Every single feature we ship weekly puts more of the travel industry inside a single platform. If you want to own the build, ship every single week, and win this $1.6T travel booking industry with a low ego, AI native team, we should 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.

Senior Software Engineer

We're growing the product engineering team and looking for strong full-stack engineers to own real product surfaces end to end. This isn't a specialist role. You work where needed across our squads: everything from backend data models, Hotwire front end, background jobs, third-party calls where the work requires them, mobile work, etc. Wherever the feature needs you, you go. We have engineering needs across the board to specifically help us build our agency back office, advisor workflows, supplier build-out/finance work, and support engineering, with the roadmap continuously evolving.

You'll partner closely with product and design to turn a rough problem into a shipped feature, then watch it in production and own the fixes. Over time, as you build a track record here, you'll take on more ambiguous problems and more responsibility for the areas you own.

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.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• 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 or feature faster than the last
• Make the engineers around you better through code reviews that teach and context shared early

WHAT YOU HAVE

• Full-stack range: Track record of owning features across the stack, backend data modeling, business logic, and front-end UI, not just one layer. You're comfortable moving between a schema migration and a UI polish pass in the same week.
• Ruby on Rails fluency: Real production experience in Rails or a comparable MVC framework. You know the conventions, you know where they break down, and you know when to bend them.
• High agency: You've taken ambiguous, underspecified problems and driven them to a working outcome without someone managing the steps.
• Product sense: You care about what you're building, not just how. You push back on a spec when the user experience doesn't add up.
• Reliability instincts: You think in edge cases, failure modes, and observability by default. Production monitoring is part of how you build, not something you bolt on after.
• AI in your daily workflow: Specific examples of where AI made you faster or better. You use it to move fast while questioning its output.

This isn't your role if you want to stay in one layer of the stack, need fully specified tickets to start, or treat testing and monitoring as someone else's job.

BONUS POINTS

• Experience with Hotwire, Turbo, or Stimulus specifically
• Comfortable touching third-party integrations when a feature calls for it
• Background at a small, fast-moving product team where you owned features broadly rather than a narrow slice

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.