The posting
Mobile is one of the most visible bets we're making, and you'd own it. There's no existing travel advisor app to maintain. You would have an immense amount of influence on the patterns and priorities. You’ll iterate on how mobile works at Tern, ship in front of every advisors every single week, and watch the team build on what the foundation you set. If you want a surface that's truly yours at a company moving this fast, this is it.
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 MOBILE ENGINEER
Advisors run their business on Tern. Right now they do it from a laptop, the next chapter is in their pocket. An advisor mobile app that lets them check a booking, message a client, and keep a trip moving from wherever they are is the future. We want it in advisors’ hands this year.
This is a build-from-the-ground role. You'll own the mobile app end to end. The native shell, the native functionality, the embedded web views where they make sense, and the Rails APIs underneath. The "I'm blocked waiting on my endpoint" dynamic doesn't work here. The person who owns the screen owns the API behind it.
You’ll work with another paired engineer and PM/design partners to build on mobile over time. Part of the job is leaving behind patterns for platform library usage, web views, release, and on-call, so everyone can move fast. You'll ship every week, own what you ship in production, and set the standard for how mobile gets built at Tern.
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 fresh 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. Mobile is a net-new surface for our advisor product and you'll define it. 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
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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. Mobile is being built with hybrid (native + web) technologies and embedded web views on top of those same Rails APIs. 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.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Own the advisor mobile app end to end including the native shell, hybrid surfaces, embedded web views, and the Rails APIs behind them
- Get a usable app into advisors' hands as soon as possible by shipping working pieces every single week along the way
- Build and extend the Rails APIs the app depends on, rather than waiting for someone else to spec them
- Iterate on the foundations the team will live with by developing the build and release pipeline, app store process, crash reporting, and on-call for mobile
- Establish the hybrid and web-view patterns that two advisor pairs and a new designer can build on
- Watch your app in production and catch issues before advisors do
WHAT YOU HAVE
- Shipped mobile ownership: You've personally shipped a mobile app to the App Store and/or Play Store and kept it healthy after launch. You have real stories about what broke in production and how you fixed it for good.
- Full-stack range: You're comfortable writing the backend and the screen. You've built or extended the APIs your app consumed, and "blocked on my endpoint" isn't a phrase you reach for.
- Pragmatic about the toolkit: You've worked across native and hybrid, and you make a clear-eyed call on when an embedded web view is the right answer. You optimize for what ships and holds up, not for purity.
- High agency: You've taken ambiguous, under-specified problems and driven them to a working outcome without someone managing the steps.
- AI in your daily workflow: Specific examples of where AI made your work faster or better, with the judgment to question its output rather than ship it wholesale.
BONUS POINTS
- Comfortable in Ruby on Rails or a comparable MVC backend
- Experience standing up a mobile app and its release process from zero
- Background at a smaller company or startup where you owned a product surface end to end
- Built consumer or pro-tool apps where reliability and polish mattered
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.
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 mobile 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.
