{"id":837166,"url":"https://alion.io/job/tern-senior-software-engineer","title":"Senior Software Engineer","company":{"id":689500,"name":"Tern","domain":"tern.travel","url":"https://alion.io/company/tern-3","size_band":"1-10","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":88,"open_postings":8,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.5,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-11-01T06:10:25Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":175000,"max":200000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":200000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"Hotwire","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"MVC","optional":false},{"name":"Ruby on Rails","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":true},{"name":"Google BigQuery","optional":true},{"name":"Heroku","optional":true},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":true},{"name":"Ruby","optional":true},{"name":"Stimulus","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-03T00:50:22Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-03","last_verified_at":"2026-11-01T23:28:20Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":60,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":[],"days_open":59},"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.\nABOUT TERN\nTern 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.\nNearly 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.\nBut 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.\nAt Tern, we believe in small business. We believe in the power of travel. And we're building the future of both.\nSenior Software Engineer\nWe'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.\nYou'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.\nWhy Tern?\nTern 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.\nThis 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.\nEngineering Standards\nShip regularly. Every engineering pair ships a working, tested feature every week. Fast and good are not in tension. Testing is part of the build.\n\nWe 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.\n\nWe 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.\n\nEvery 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.\n\nOur stack\nTern 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.\nWHAT YOU'LL DO\nShip working, tested integration features every week, broken into the smallest shippable pieces\n\nContribute to the abstractions, tooling, and AI-assisted workflows that make each new integration or feature faster than the last\n\nMake the engineers around you better through code reviews that teach and context shared early\n\nWHAT YOU HAVE\nFull-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.\n\nRuby 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.\n\nHigh agency: You've taken ambiguous, underspecified problems and driven them to a working outcome without someone managing the steps.\n\nProduct 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.\n\nReliability 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.\n\nAI in your daily workflow: Specific examples of where AI made you faster or better. You use it to move fast while questioning its output.\n\nThis 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.\nBONUS POINTS\nExperience with Hotwire, Turbo, or Stimulus specifically\n\nComfortable touching third-party integrations when a feature calls for it\n\nBackground at a small, fast-moving product team where you owned features broadly rather than a narrow slice\n\nWHAT WE VALUE @ TERN\nWe'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.\nWe 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.\nWe 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.\nOperating Principles:\nWe deeply understand our users. At every level of the organization, we obsess about understanding those we serve and the industry we operate in.\nWe 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\".\nWe 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.\nWe 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.\nWe 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.\nHOW WE HIRE\nOur interview is built to surface demonstrated execution, and we keep it deliberately light rather than a long gauntlet\n\nWe screen resumes for specific, verifiable things you shipped and the impact they had, not responsibilities or titles\n\nWe 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.\n\nWe give a practical exercise that reflects the actual work, with AI tools available and expected\n\nAnd throughout, we look for evidence that working with you made other engineers better at their jobs\n\nWe 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.\nWHY JOIN TERN?\nBe part of a mission-driven team transforming the travel planning space\n\nWork with a supportive, curious, and creative team\n\nInfluence and shape our engineering approach from the ground up\n\nCompetitive salary, equity, and benefits package\n\nTern 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":8850,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Travel Technology"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-12T19:41:30Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":21,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.59,"p_room":0.35,"age_days":59,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["conf:2","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-11-01T06:10:25Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":200000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/tern-senior-software-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/tern-senior-software-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-02T01:34:12Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2452,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-03T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":689500},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=689500"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Ftern-senior-software-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Ftern-senior-software-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Ftern-senior-software-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/tern-senior-software-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Ftern-senior-software-engineer"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":837166}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"tern.travel","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":837166},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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