Senior Product Designer

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 PRODUCT DESIGNER- SUPPLIER INTEGRATIONS & BOOKING

Travel advisors get into this business to curate incredible travel experiences for their client. They love the craft and the relationships, seeing the impact travel can have. This is the rewarding work they want to spend their time on.

Ask what their day actually looks like and it's not that. They are bouncing across a dozen browser tabs, hopping between supplier portals, pasting details into a quote, chasing everchanging pricing, and re-confirming with the client every time it moves. The work they love is buried under the work created by legacy, disconnected systems.

As the designer responsible for supplier integrations and booking, you get to minimize that tedious work, allowing advisors to focus back on the job they love.

Supplier integration and in-platform booking is one of Tern's most important strategic bets. We've built the foundations across tours and insurance and seen early proof that putting supplier content and booking inside the advisor's workflow genuinely changes how they work. The job now is to take that signal and scale it: make the experience dramatically better than the tools advisors already trust, expand into new categories like lodging and cruises, and turn early traction into the way the whole channel operates.

You'll be designing around a live product with real UX debt and the hard limits of partner APIs, calling what's worth rebuilding, what's worth shipping as-is to learn from, and how to make a constrained experience still feel effortless. If that sounds disappointing or exhausting, this isn't a great fit. But if that challenge sounds energizing and rewarding, we can’t wait to chat!

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Own browse, quote, and book end-to-end as we expand into new supplier categories, including lodging and cruise

• Diagnose why advisors aren't adopting today's integrations and fix the UX issues holding them back, so more booking volume flows through Tern

• Design how supplier discovery and quoting work inside Tern's agentic AI by establishing the patterns for browsing and quoting via Chat

• Talk to advisors regularly and bring their real workflows (and their reasons for sticking with supplier portals) into the product

• Partner tightly with the integrations PM and engineers to scope what's technically possible against partner APIs, and sequence toward shippable versions

• Help shape how design works at Tern as the team scales: critique, systems, rituals, and future hires

WHAT YOU HAVE

• 0→1 product design on complex surfaces: You've shipped meaningful product end-to-end in a startup or fast-moving environment, including new products from scratch, not just iterations on mature flows

• Designs around real constraints: You navigate UX, technical, and business tradeoffs, and you can design a great experience inside the limits of legacy UX and third-party APIs. You know when to push for the ideal and when to ship to learn.

• Strong product instincts + velocity: You move quickly and pragmatically, juggling multiple projects at different stages, and you ship value without waiting for perfect inputs

• Thrives in ambiguity and owns outcomes: You take initiative, seek clarity, and bring users' voices into the work yourself

• Energized by AI-enabled workflows: You’re constantly pushing the depth and breadth of your impact by experimenting with and adopting new tooling in your design process

BONUS POINTS

• Experience designing integrations, marketplace, or booking/quoting tools

• Experience in travel tech, or another domain with messy third-party data and supplier/partner APIs

• Hands-on curiosity about how LLMs and agentic AI change product experiences

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.

👂 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 THIS ROLE IS EXCITING

You'd be designing the difference between an advisor's worst hours and their best ones. The craft of planning a trip is the part they love; everything around it. The portals, the forms, the endless re-quoting, is the part they endure. This role makes the second part vanish, so there's more room for the first.

And you'd get to do it in a way almost no product team can. Tern ships faster than anyone in the business, shipping new features each week to a community of advisors who are genuinely engaged and vocal about what they need. You won't design into a void and wait a quarter to learn if you were right. You'll put work in front of real users, hear back almost immediately, and watch how it changes their day. That feedback loop is what makes building at Tern different, and it's how a constrained, messy problem turns into a product advisors love.

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 user success strategy 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.