Staff AI Tooling Engineer: Lead Agentic R&D

Tern Travel, Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Tern Travel is hiring a Staff Engineer for AI tooling who drives agentic development within a Ruby on Rails stack. You will ship production features weekly and build the tooling and workflows the team relies on, pushing the boundaries of agentic workflows.

You’ll lead by example, mentor others, and help evolve the engineering culture toward fast, reliable AI-enabled delivery across our platform for travel advisors and partners.

Qualifications

• Agentic development fluency demonstrated by shipped work and pattern recognition.
• Public signal through open work on agentic patterns, MCP, evals or codegen.
• Current individual shipping record showing consistent delivery of working features.

Responsibilities

• Ship real engineering work weekly in the same codebase and Problems as the team.
• Accelerate R&D workflows by building custom skills and agents.
• Tackle bottlenecks that cap autonomous throughput today, including code review.
• Train and certify engineers on new workflows so improvements land.
• Teach and build in the open as a core part of the job.
• Level up the team’s evals, tooling, and prompt engineering practices.

Skills

Agentic development fluency

Public signal

Current individual shipping record

AI fluency with judgment

Leveling instinct

Tools

Claude Code

MCP server

Codegen pipelines

Job description

Tern Travel is hiring a Staff Engineer for AI tooling who drives agentic development within a Ruby on Rails stack. You will ship production features weekly and build the tooling and workflows the team relies on, pushing the boundaries of agentic workflows.

You’ll lead by example, mentor others, and help evolve the engineering culture toward fast, reliable AI-enabled delivery across our platform for travel advisors and partners.