Staff Engineer, R&D AI Tooling
Tern Travel · Remote · United States ·
COMPENSATION
$225k – $250k
Listed on the employer's job board (Ashby)
- Staff level role
- Fully remote
- Ruby on Rails
- AI-native culture
- Equity included
Tern is reshaping the travel agency industry by providing modern infrastructure for small business advisors. As a Staff Engineer in R&D AI Tooling, you will drive the adoption of agentic development practices across the organization. This position requires hands-on coding alongside the creation of custom agents and workflows that enhance team productivity.
What you'll do
- Ship production engineering work weekly alongside the rest of the team
- Build and optimize custom skills and agents for internal workflows
- Remove bottlenecks in code review to enable autonomous throughput
- Train and certify engineers on new AI-driven development practices
- Improve evaluation frameworks and prompt engineering standards
What you'll need
- Staff or principal background at an AI-native company
- Proven experience shipping agentic workflows and MCP integrations
- Public portfolio demonstrating work in agentic patterns or evals
- Strong judgment in using AI to accelerate development safely
- Desire to teach and elevate the technical bar for colleagues
Nice to have
- Experience building developer tooling or internal platforms at scale
- Background in MCP server development or Claude Code integrations
- Previous work with Ruby on Rails or comparable technology stacks
Stack
- Ruby on Rails
- Hotwire
- Postgres
- Heroku
- Google Cloud Platform
- BigQuery
- Hex
- Claude Code
How you'll work
- Fully remote position
- Collaborative pairing and teaching environment
- Weekly shipping cycle for features
What you get
- Competitive salary package
- Equity ownership
- Comprehensive benefits
- Supportive and curious team culture
Hiring process
- Resume screening for specific shipped impact
- Deep dive into one or two personal projects
- Practical exercise using AI tools
- Assessment of ability to improve other engineers