# Staff Engineer, R&D AI Tooling at Tern

- Company: Tern
- What the company does: Plan Less. Get Out More. AI planning for everyday life. Backed by Techstars.
- Company website: https://travelwithtern.com
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Senior
- Location: United States
- Work setup: Remote
- Pay: $225K to $250K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-06-04
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tern/208e151d-469b-4efa-8fce-af3aeee050c3
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/tern-staff-engineer-r-and-d-ai-tooling/

## About the role

Ship real engineering work every week in the same codebase and on the same problems as the rest of the team- your credibility and your tooling both come from being in the work Accelerate and compound our R&D workflows: optimize day, to, day engineering, build and improve custom skills and agents, push toward fully agentic overnight workflows where they make sense

## What they're looking for

- Agentic development fluency: Staff or principal background at an AI-native company that has genuinely figured out agentic workflows. Specific things you've shipped, MCP integrations, custom agents, eval frameworks, codegen pipelines, not slides about it
- Public signal: You write or build in the open on agentic patterns, MCP, evals, or codegen. People in this space already follow your work. If we've heard of you and are following your work, we want to talk
- Current individual shipping record: You earn the right to set the bar by being excellent at the work and staying in it. You do not want to step back from shipping
- AI fluency with judgment: You use AI to move dramatically faster while questioning its assumptions. You know when output looks right but isn't, and you build systems that catch it
- Leveling instinct: You're genuinely excited about bringing the team along, not just building ahead of everyone. Navigating that gap, with real excitement about it, is something you've done before

Tags: Engineering