Staff Engineer, R&D AI Tooling @ Tern Travel

Staff Engineer, R&D AI Tooling @ Tern Travel Location: United States Type: FullTime Workplace: Remote Compensation: $225K – $250K • Offers Equity 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. Yo