Tern Software
Staff Engineer, R&D AI Tooling
$225K–$250K
United States · Remote · Staff · Full-time · Posted Jun 4, 2026
- Experience
- Staff or principal background at an AI-native company; no years specified.
About the job
Ship production engineering work while building AI tooling and workflows that increase the engineering team’s speed and autonomous throughput.
What you'll do
- Ship engineering work weekly in the main codebase and build or improve R&D workflows, custom skills, and agents.
- Address bottlenecks such as code review and develop evals, tooling, and prompt engineering practices.
- Train and certify engineers, teaching and pairing to help the team adopt new workflows.
What they ask for
- Demonstrated production experience with agentic development, including shipped work such as MCP integrations, custom agents, eval frameworks, or codegen pipelines.
- A current individual shipping record and willingness to continue hands-on engineering.
- Public writing or open-source work on agentic patterns, MCP, evals, or codegen.
- Experience bringing engineers along and using AI with judgment to assess and validate its output.
Nice to have
- Developer tooling or internal platform experience at scale.
- MCP server development, Claude Code integrations, or Ruby on Rails (or a comparable stack).
Pay
$225K – $250K USD base salary
Tools
Claude Code, MCP, Ruby on Rails, Hotwire, Postgres, Heroku, Google Cloud Platform, BigQuery
AI focus
Build and improve agentic development tooling and workflows, including custom skills and agents, MCP-based tooling, overnight workflows, code review automation, evals, and prompt engineering; teach the team to use these workflows.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative