Senior Supplier Integration Lead
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AI Summary
Integrations are vital to Tern’s success. We’ve proven they work and we will win this $1.6T industry. This role builds and leads these integrations, setting the patterns the entire team builds on for years. If you want to own the architecture while leading a talented squad shipping the travel industry's most important integrations every single week, come build it with us.
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.
SENIOR SUPPLIER INTEGRATION ENGINEER LEAD
Tern's success and growth runs through integrated suppliers. Every supplier integration we add expands what advisors can book without leaving the app, and every integration that runs reliably earns their trust in a way no feature can. We've been building toward this moment, and now we're ready to grow it properly.
You'll lead the integrations squad, the team building net-new bookable inventory: our first cruise integration, our first lodging integration, then every cruise, lodging, and insurance partner we can get. This isn't a coordination role. You'll own the architecture, write the code, and set the standard for how a new supplier gets connected from the first design conversation through production monitoring. The patterns you establish determine how fast the team moves for years.
You'll partner closely with a second integration engineer from the start. You set the direction, they build alongside you. Over time, as the team grows, you'll grow into coaching and leading more engineers, but you stay in the work.
Why Tern?
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.
A note on how we structure senior roles: Tern runs a player-coach model. Our most senior engineers lead through their own work first, and grow into coaching and, over time, managing the engineers around them. We hire people who can lead a project thread without becoming a bottleneck.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
Own the integration capability end to end: the architecture, patterns, and standard for how a new supplier gets connected, from API design through production
Ship Tern's first cruise and lodging integrations, the actual code, not just the plan
Navigate the realities of third-party APIs: undocumented behavior, rate limits, inconsistent data, and partners who change things without warning, and turn that into something dependable
Build abstractions, tooling, and AI-assisted workflows that make each new integration faster than the last, so team velocity compounds as we scale
Partner with and lead a second integration engineer; set the direction for the work and grow into coaching as the team expands
Watch integrations in production and catch failures before advisors do
Ship working, tested features every week, broken into the smallest shippable pieces
WHAT YOU HAVE
Integration ownership: Track record of personally shipping and owning integrations with external systems and third-party APIs, with real stories about what broke, how you found it, and how you fixed it for good. Experience at companies built around heavy external-integration work is a strong signal.
Technical leadership through doing: You've set the standard on a team through your own code and reviews, not by managing. Engineers looked to your work for the bar.
High agency: You've taken ambiguous, under, specified problems and driven them to a working outcome without someone managing the steps. An undocumented API or a partner who changes behavior mid-integration doesn't stop you.
Reliability instincts: You think in failure modes, retries, idempotency, and observability by default. Production monitoring is part of how you build, not something you bolt on after the fact.
AI in your daily workflow: Specific examples of where AI made your integration work faster or better. You use it to move fast while questioning its output.
This isn't your role if you need fully specified tickets to start, hand off after the happy path works, or treat testing and monitoring as someone else's job.
BONUS POINTS
Experience integrating travel industry APIs: GDS, booking systems, supplier data feeds
Background at a company where the core product was built on external API integrations
Comfortable in Ruby on Rails or a comparable MVC stack
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.
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.
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 engineering approach 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.
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