Staff Engineer, R&D AI Tooling

Every engineer at Tern builds with AI. AI adoption and fluency is demanded, and is world class across the entire org. If you'd rather design from a distance, or build ahead of everyone in isolation rather than teach and pair, this isn't the right fit. If you're the person who has been the top 1% on agentic workflows for a while and you're hungry to build the team around you into something genuinely exceptional at this, we want to talk.

Every team at Tern is an AI team. 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. It's working. This role is the person who pushes it dramatically further.

We're looking for a staff-level engineer who is demonstrably ahead of most teams on agentic development, not in theory, in production. You'll ship real engineering work in the main codebase every week, and from inside that work, build the tooling and workflows that make the entire team faster. The direction you set comes from having your hands on the same problems as the rest of the team.