Overview

Tern Software Inc., a venture-backed travel industry startup, is looking for a talented Infrastructure Engineer to join our team.

At Tern, we’re passionate about the power of travel and its ability to broaden worldviews. We’re committed to supporting travel advisors and the small businesses they run, helping them make the world more approachable for their clients.

As an Infrastructure Engineer, you’ll join a small, high-performing team of experienced product builders. This role bridges deep backend engineering skills with infrastructure stewardship. While we rely heavily on Heroku to manage our system environments, the scope of your work will extend across critical areas such as scalability, observability, performance, and reliability of our systems and services.

We value autonomy, craftsmanship, and a customer-first mindset. We build fast and iterate often—but we also believe deeply in building things that last. If you thrive in an environment where your decisions can directly impact the stability and performance of systems used by thousands, then this might be your place.

We’re not looking for a systems administrator or a traditional ops engineer—we’re looking for a backend-savvy software engineer who loves infrastructure and cares deeply about performance, reliability, and developer experience.

Key Responsibilities

As a Tern Infrastructure Engineer, you’ll help ensure our systems are scalable, observable, performant, secure, and cost-effective. Your responsibilities will include:

• Maintain and evolve network infrastructure, including CDN (Fastly), DNS, edge web servers, and email services, to ensure fast and reliable client communications.

• Manage compute environments for application, background, and scheduled processing, with an eye toward stability, performance, and operational efficiency.

• Oversee storage systems, including object storage (GCS/S3) and data layer technologies like PostgreSQL and Redis, ensuring high availability and performance.

• Support and secure 3rd-party integrations, such as OpenAI, to enable seamless external capabilities across Tern’s product suite.

• Own CI/CD infrastructure, continuously improving build and deployment pipelines, release visibility, rollback mechanisms, and feature flag tooling (Flipper).

• Improve observability and alerting systems, leveraging tools like Bugsnag, Appsignal, and Pagerduty to monitor application health and respond to incidents effectively.

• Drive system-wide performance, security, and reliability, identifying bottlenecks, resolving deadlocks and timeouts, and proactively managing system risk.

• Plan for scaling and optimize infrastructure costs, balancing growth with budget-conscious resource usage and system design.

• Elevate developer experience, minimizing friction in engineering workflows through better tooling, documentation, and environment stability.

Qualifications

The ideal candidate for this role should have:

• Strong backend development experience, particularly with Ruby and Ruby on Rails

• Deep experience managing web infrastructure in production, ideally within a Heroku-based environment

• Familiarity with CDN, DNS, edge services, and email infrastructure

• Proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and key-value stores (Redis)

• A solid understanding of observability tools (Bugsnag, Appsignal), incident response (Pagerduty), and performance tuning

• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and deployment tooling

• A track record of building reliable systems at scale and diagnosing complex issues in production environments

• Thoughtfulness around cost and performance tradeoffs in infrastructure decisions

• Experience working on a remote team and excellent written and verbal communication skills

• Empathy for teammates and a default assumption of good intentions from them

We understand this is a wide-ranging role and don’t expect you to have deep expertise in every area. If you’re excited by the opportunity and have a strong foundation in backend engineering and systems thinking, we encourage you to apply.

Finally, alignment with Tern's values is non-negotiable for this role. Tern’s values are:

• We are in constant pursuit of growth. We’re endlessly curious and relish learning new things. We’re never satisfied with where we’re at and seek out ways to improve ourselves. We invest in our team and believe in growth at all levels. We believe growth is catalyzed when a diversity of perspectives is combined with an obligation to dissent.

• We approach life with an optimistic sense of agency. When life gives us lemons, we choose to make lemonade. We aspire to build an enduring company and know the road to get there is full of peaks and valleys. We strive to stay positive, kind, and authentic in every phase of the journey.

• Our ambition is to be extraordinary. We’re comfortable with the fact that the journey to get there takes effort. We put in the work to build something that matters to ourselves, to our teammates, and to our customers.

Location, Pay & Benefits

Location: Remote

Pay: $150,000 - $200,000

Benefits: We cover 100% of employee premiums for health, vision, and dental insurance. We cover 75% of dependent premiums. Tern offers flexible time off and provides all the hardware you need to be effective at the job.