Implementation Tooling Engineer

Tern can sign agencies faster than it can bring them on. The bottleneck isn't sales, it's that every migration still leans on manual work that should be a tool. If turning slow, repetitive, error-prone processes into infrastructure that just runs sounds deeply satisfying, let's 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.

IMPLEMENTATION TOOLING ENGINEER

Tern has 10,000+ advisors, $2B+ in annualized GMV, and more agencies that want in than it can currently onboard. The constraint isn't demand. It's that getting an agency live still depends on too much manual work. This looks like cleaning data by hand, babysitting syncs, fixing the same class of problem one record at a time.

As the implementation tooling engineer, you turn that manual work into infrastructure. You'll own the systems that make migrations bulk and repeatable, the sync infrastructure that keeps advisor data flowing into the partner networks that power their marketing, and the data-quality foundations everything downstream depends on. You'll also own the unglamorous, high-stakes part: keeping those integrations healthy so they don't silently drift, and replacing scattered one-off logic with shared infrastructure that behaves the same way every time.

Tern ships to advisors every week. In this role, implementation gets measurably faster and more reliable every week, because of you. If you'd rather own a clean greenfield than harden the systems a growing business actually runs on, this isn't the seat. If making the messy machine run beautifully is your kind of problem, it very much is.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Turn slow, manual migration steps into bulk, repeatable operations, so the team can onboard far more agencies without adding headcount

• Own and harden the partner-network sync infrastructure and one-way agency syncs: keep advisor data flowing reliably, catch and fix the cases where syncs silently drift, and bring fragile no-code flows in-house as maintainable code

• Consolidate scattered, per-integration logic into shared infrastructure so changes propagate the same way everywhere instead of failing quietly

• Build the data-quality enforcement that clears the gates currently blocking migrations

• Keep the pipeline fast, idempotent, and safe at the volumes scaling demands

• Turn the manual steps that limit throughput into automated tooling the team actually adopts

WHAT YOU HAVE

• Backend and data-pipeline engineering. Strong in a backend stack and SQL, with real experience building data pipelines and background-job systems that run reliably at volume (we're Rails, Sidekiq, dbt, BigQuery).

• Tooling that lasts. You've taken a manual, repetitive process and replaced it with tooling that got adopted and stayed adopted. You can show the before and the after.

• Integration ownership. You've owned third-party integrations or syncs and kept them healthy. You understand drift, idempotency, fan-out, and why "something changed, re-sync it" is harder than it sounds.

• High agency. You take a planned backlog and execute without needing every ticket fully specced, and you surface the right trade-offs instead of quietly over-building.

BONUS POINTS

• Hands-on fluency with AI-assisted development tools (Cursor, Claude) to tighten the loop

• Background in travel tech, CRM, or partner-network / back-office integrations

• Experience retiring brittle no-code or Zapier-style flows into owned, maintainable code

WHAT WE VALUE @ TERN

🌱 We'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.

🧭 We 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.

💪 We 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.

Operating Principles:

👂 We deeply understand our users. At every level of the organization, we obsess about understanding those we serve and the industry we operate in.

➕ We 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".

📣 We 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.

🏃 We 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.

🤣 We 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.

WHY THIS ROLE IS EXCITING

There's a backlog of high-leverage infrastructure already scoped and waiting for an owner to take implementation from a handful of agencies a week toward many a day. You'd own it outright, and the impact is immediate: the systems you build touch real GMV, and Tern ships weekly, so what you write is live for advisors days later.

The best part is the compounding. Every manual process you replace stops being a problem for good. Every integration you harden stops paging the team. Six months in, the machine runs faster than it did when you arrived, and you can point at exactly why. If you like building the quiet infrastructure that makes everything else possible, this is that role.

WHY JOIN TERN?

• Be part of a mission-driven team transforming the travel planning space

• Work with a supportive, curious, and creative team

• Influence and shape our user success strategy from the ground up

• Competitive salary, equity, and benefits package

Tern 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.