AI & Data Engineer
Tern Travel is seeking an AI & Data Engineer to build and own the core AI and data systems for their product. This role involves developing trustworthy AI features, creating evaluation systems, ensuring data quality, and maintaining ETL pipelines to support advisor reporting.
This role builds and owns the AI and data systems at the core of Tern's product. You'll set the standard on evals, pipeline reliability, and advisor reporting on a small team where the scope is real and the ownership is yours. If you've been waiting for AI problems worth owning, this is that job.
AI is becoming central to Tern's product, and the quality of those AI features lives or dies on the data behind them. This role sits right at that intersection. You'll be a senior builder on our data team, working closely with our Data / AI Lead, and your north star is making Tern's AI features trustworthy. That's an engineering problem, and you'll solve it by building: the systems those features run on, the eval harnesses that tell us whether they're actually good, and the monitoring that catches quality and drift in production.
That work rests on a data foundation you'll also own. Tern is the system of record for every advisor and agency on the platform, so our data is one of the most valuable things we have, and it has to do double duty; feeding the AI features that are becoming core to the product, and powering the reporting that advisors and agency owners rely on to run their businesses. You'll own that data end to end, from the pipelines that move it through to the reporting built on top of it, so the AI work always has solid ground to stand on.
Tern 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.
This 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.
Tern 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 into BigQuery, where we model it with dbt and build reporting in ThoughtSpot and Hex. Claude Code 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.
Posted June 8, 2026