Site Reliability Engineer

Tern Travel

21d•$175,000 - $200,000•Remote

About The Position

Tern is preparing for significant growth, with its user base expected to triple and large host agencies coming on board. The infrastructure needs to be ready to handle this expansion. This role is crucial for owning the migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), building robust monitoring and alerting systems, and optimizing critical performance paths. The Site Reliability Engineer will be a key figure, ensuring the stability and scalability of Tern's platform, which is built on a Ruby on Rails application with a Postgres core, currently hosted on Heroku and migrating to GCP. The data pipeline involves Fivetran, BigQuery, and Hex. This is a player-coach role, starting as the technical lead for infrastructure and evolving into coaching and managing engineers. Tern is a venture-backed company focused on empowering small businesses in the travel agency industry with modern technology, aiming to reshape the industry through AI and sustainable travel practices.

Requirements

Production reliability ownership with a track record of personally owning production reliability at meaningful scale.
Concrete stories of incidents led, fixed, and prevented from recurring.
Real experience owning a cloud migration end-to-end.
Fluent in GCP (or a comparable cloud), infrastructure-as-code, and understanding of distributed systems failure modes.
Experience building monitoring and alerting that surfaces problems before users find them.
High agency: ability to identify and fix the highest leverage reliability problems without being assigned.
Specific examples of how AI has improved debugging, automation, or operational workflows.

Nice To Haves

GCP migration experience, specifically from Heroku or another PaaS.
Experience with Fivetran, BigQuery, or Hex in a production data pipeline.
Experience managing or coaching infrastructure engineers.

Responsibilities

Own the migration from Heroku to Google Cloud Platform, including architecture, execution, and cutover.
Build and maintain the Postgres core, Fivetran pipeline, BigQuery data layer, and Hex reporting infrastructure.
Optimize key backend code paths and third-party syncs to ensure performance as volume increases.
Own monitoring, alerting, cost reduction, and proactive scaling to anticipate growth.
Lead incident response and write post-mortems to drive permanent fixes and team learning.
Set and elevate the operational standards across the engineering team.