Senior Software Engineer
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Key skills for this role
Role Overview
Join Tern's product engineering team to own real product surfaces end to end for a platform serving travel advisors.
Work broadly across squads, including backend data models, front-end work, background jobs, third-party calls, mobile work, and evolving roadmap areas.
Take on increasingly ambiguous problems and greater ownership as you build a track record at Tern.
Key Skills for This Role
Full Job Posting
Role overview
Join Tern's product engineering team to own real product surfaces end to end for a platform serving travel advisors.
Work broadly across squads, including backend data models, front-end work, background jobs, third-party calls, mobile work, and evolving roadmap areas.
Take on increasingly ambiguous problems and greater ownership as you build a track record at Tern.
About Tern
Tern is a venture-backed software company building infrastructure and workflows for travel advisors and small travel agencies.
Its platform helps travel advisors run more efficient, professional, and profitable operations.
What you will do
- Ship working, tested integration features every week in the smallest shippable pieces.
- Contribute to abstractions, tooling, and AI-assisted workflows that make future integrations and features faster.
- Improve the team through teaching-oriented code reviews and early context sharing.
- Partner with product and design to turn rough problems into shipped features and own production fixes end to end.
What you have
- A track record of owning features across backend data modeling, business logic, and front-end UI.
- Production fluency in Ruby on Rails or a comparable MVC framework.
- High agency when driving ambiguous, underspecified problems to working outcomes independently.
- Product sense, reliability instincts, and a focus on edge cases, failure modes, observability, and user experience.
- Specific examples of using AI to improve daily development while questioning its output.
Technology stack
- Tern uses Ruby on Rails, a Hotwire front end, Postgres, and Heroku, with migration to Google Cloud Platform underway.
- Data flows to BigQuery, with reporting built in Hex.
- Claude Code and a custom library of skills and agents are part of daily development.
Engineering standards
Engineering pairs ship working, tested features weekly, and testing is part of the build.
Engineers own code and user experience, monitor production behavior, and own fixes end to end.
Teams use AI in daily work for design review, test generation, debugging, and agentic tooling.
Engineers help colleagues become faster through code reviews, clear written work, and timely unblocking.
Bonus points
- Experience with Hotwire, Turbo, or Stimulus.
- Comfort working with third-party integrations.
- Experience at a small, fast-moving product team with broad ownership.
Why join Tern
- Join a mission-driven team transforming travel planning and influence the engineering approach from the ground up.
- Work with a supportive, curious, and creative team.
- The role includes a competitive salary, equity, and benefits package.
Hiring process
- The process emphasizes specific, verifiable examples of shipped work and impact, a practical exercise reflecting the role, and evidence of improving other engineers' effectiveness.
About tern
Tern is travel-agency software for advisors and agencies to build itineraries, manage clients, and track commissions.
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