Tern Travel - Site Reliability Engineer
Upload My Resume
Drop here or click to browse · Tap to choose · PDF, DOCX, DOC, RTF, TXT
Requirements
• Production reliability ownership: Track record of personally owning production reliability at meaningful scale. Concrete stories of incidents you led, fixed, and prevented from recurring, not just participated in. This is a primary responsibility, not something you've done on the side. • Production reliability ownership: • Infrastructure migrations: Real experience owning a cloud migration end to end, not just contributing to one. Fluent in GCP (or a comparable cloud), infrastructure-as-code, and the failure modes of distributed systems. • Infrastructure migrations: • Observability and proactive operations: You build monitoring and alerting that surfaces problems before users find them. You know what to instrument, what to alert on, and what's just noise. • Observability and proactive operations: • High agency: You find the highest-leverage reliability problem and go fix it without being assigned to it. You don't wait for an outage to justify the work. • High agency: • AI in your working habits: Specific examples of how AI has made your debugging, automation, or operational workflows faster or more reliable. • AI in your working habits: • GCP migration experience, specifically from Heroku or another PaaS • Experience with Fivetran, BigQuery, or Hex in a production data pipeline • Has managed or coached infrastructure engineers • 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're always leveling up. • 🧭 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 act with optimistic agency. • 💪 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. • 👂 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 deeply understand our users. • ➕ 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 embrace the power of and, and not 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 speak up and move forward. • 🏃 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 move fast and sweat the details. • 🤣 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. • 🤣 We take the work seriously, but not ourselves. • HOW WE HIRE • Our interview is built to surface demonstrated execution, and we keep it deliberately light rather than a long gauntlet • We screen resumes for specific, verifiable things you shipped and the impact they had, not responsibilities or titles • We 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. • We give a practical exercise that reflects the actual work, with AI tools available and expected • And throughout, we look for evidence that working with you made other engineers better at their jobs • We 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.
Responsibilities
• Own the migration from Heroku to Google Cloud Platform: architecture, execution, and a cutover that doesn't surprise anyone • Build and maintain the Postgres core, Fivetran pipeline: BigQuery data layer, and Hex reporting infrastructure • Optimize the hot paths that matter most: key backend code paths and our heaviest third, party syncs, so performance holds as volume climbs • Own monitoring, alerting, cost reduction, and proactive scaling: surface problems early, keep spend sane, and stay ahead of growth rather than reacting to it • Lead incident response and write post-mortems that turn an outage into a permanent fix and a smarter team • Set the operational bar across engineering and pull others up to it • We 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. • We give a practical exercise that reflects the actual work, with AI tools available and expected • And throughout, we look for evidence that working with you made other engineers better at their jobs • We 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.
Benefits
• $175K – $200K • Offers Equity • Tern's user base is about to triple. Large host agencies are coming on board this year, and the infrastructure needs to be ready before they arrive. If you want to own the migration, build the monitoring, and be the person every other engineer at Tern depends on, this is your role. • 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. • 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. • Engineering Standards • Ship regularly. Every engineering pair ships a working, tested feature every week. Fast and good are not in tension. Testing is part of the build. • We 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. • We 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. • Every 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. • Our stack • 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 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. • Be part of a mission-driven team transforming the travel planning space • Work with a supportive, curious, and creative team • Own the infrastructure layer of a product used by thousands of travel advisors running their businesses • 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.
No credit card. Takes 10 seconds.