VP of Engineering

Job description

Terra AI is building a new category at the intersection of artificial intelligence, geoscience, and critical resource development. As global demand for copper, lithium, nickel, rare earth elements, geothermal energy, and other strategic resources accelerates, the mining and subsurface industries face a growing challenge: traditional exploration methods remain slow, expensive, and highly uncertain. Terra AI was founded to help solve this problem by redefining how critical resources are discovered, evaluated, and developed. By combining advanced machine learning, probabilistic modeling, and deep geoscience expertise, Terra AI helps exploration and mining companies make faster, more informed subsurface decisions with greater confidence and capital efficiency. The company’s platform integrates geological, geophysical, and drilling data into intelligent systems designed to improve targeting accuracy, accelerate discovery timelines, and reduce exploration risk. Backed by Khosla Ventures, BHP, and Rio Tinto, Terra AI works with industry leaders to bring a more informed, data-driven approach to critical resource development. Terra AI’s mission is to define the new global standard for data-driven critical resource development — breaking the cost and time curve required to support electrification, energy security, and the global energy transition. The company operates with a strong partnership mentality, combining technical rigor, candid communication, continual learning, and environmental stewardship to help modern exploration teams solve some of the world’s most important resource challenges. ## Who you are You’re an engineering leader and a builder. You have taken technically novel ideas beyond the prototype stage and turned them into dependable systems that real teams and customers can use. You know the difference between demonstrating a research result and engineering a capability that is reproducible, maintainable, and ready to scale. You bring deep software and systems architecture judgment, strong AI/ML fluency, and the ability to work alongside research scientists without needing to be a frontier-AI researcher yourself. You can tell when a research capability is ready to engineer, when more experimentation is needed, and where engineering feedback can sharpen the next research priorities. You’re equally comfortable reviewing an architecture, debating a model-performance tradeoff, and recruiting the engineers who will build the system. You have built teams and technical practices rather than only inherited mature organizations, and you know how to create discipline without burying a fast-moving team in process. Most importantly, you want to build. The opportunity to establish the engineering function between Research and Product excites you precisely because the architecture, standards, team, and operating model are still taking shape. ## What you’ll do Terra AI has a strong research practice developing novel models and algorithms, and a Product and Platform organization that turns mature capabilities into enterprise applications and workflows. We are looking for a VP of Engineering to build the critical function between them: translating promising research prototypes into robust, reusable backend technology that Product can confidently integrate and scale. You’ll own the engineering realization of Terra AI’s core technology. That means shaping solution architectures, choosing interfaces and abstractions, developing reusable technical primitives, and making emerging capabilities reproducible, testable, performant, observable, maintainable, and economically operable. You’ll also help determine which problems belong in research and which are ready for disciplined engineering execution. This is both a technical and organizational leadership role. You’ll personally shape early architecture decisions, recruit exceptional engineers, establish thoughtful design and delivery practices, and create strong working relationships with Research, Product, and Platform. Over time, you’ll develop leaders and a team that can mature new technologies repeatedly without relying on individual heroics. Success here means creating an engineering capability, not simply managing a delivery queue. You’ll balance technical ambition with reliability, speed, and cost while helping frontier research become technology that Terra AI and its customers can depend on. ## Core responsibilities - Build Terra AI’s technology-development organization, including early hiring, team design, leadership development, operating cadence, and clear interfaces with Research and Product - Own software and systems architecture for research-derived capabilities, including backend decomposition, APIs, data flows, abstractions, interfaces, and reusable technical components - Create a repeatable research-to-engineering maturation process with clear readiness criteria, technical milestones, validation, testing, documentation, and release standards - Establish engineering rigor in benchmarking, automated testing, observability, failure-mode characterization, versioning, reliability, and maintainability - Make pragmatic technical and economic tradeoffs across model quality, latency, compute, data requirements, deployment complexity, scalability, and ongoing operating cost - Determine which capabilities should become reusable platform primitives and which should remain project-specific, avoiding unnecessary bespoke systems - Translate uncertain research results into executable engineering programs with owners, dependencies, risks, milestones, and technical exit criteria without imposing false certainty on R&D - Partner closely with research leaders to surface engineering constraints, inform research priorities, and identify the advances that unlock the most valuable next capabilities - Partner with Product and Platform to define clear technical contracts and delivery standards so engineered capabilities can be integrated into enterprise products without rebuilding their foundations - Remain a hands-on technical executive through architecture reviews, design decisions, technical mentorship, and engineering standards while building a durable leadership bench ## Qualifications - Demonstrated experience personally maturing novel technical, algorithmic, or scientific capabilities from research or early prototype into robust engineered systems deployed in real-world environments - A track record of building a meaningful engineering function, including recruiting, team design, management practices, technical processes, and developing engineering leaders - Deep software and systems architecture judgment across backend services, computational systems, interfaces, modularity, performance, reliability, and maintainability - Experience working effectively at the boundary between research scientists or advanced algorithm teams and product engineering organizations - Strong AI/ML fluency, including probabilistic outputs, model limitations, training and inference constraints, and the practical challenges of deploying novel models; a research doctorate is not required - Experience with technically novel scientific or physical-world systems—such as robotics, autonomy, simulation, computational biology, scientific AI, or advanced modeling—is strongly preferred - Evidence of helping a technical capability and its supporting organization evolve through early versions rather than joining only after the system was mature - Executive-level cross-functional communication and judgment, with the ability to collaborate credibly with Research, Product, Platform, customers, and technical partners - Strong talent judgment and experience hiring engineers across ML systems, scientific computing, algorithmic software, data-intensive backend systems, or related disciplines - A pragmatic, low-ego approach to ambiguity, technical quality, collaboration, and ownership - This is a full-time hybrid position based in Redwood City, California. Team members work in the office Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with remote work on Tuesday and Thursday. ## Compensation & Benefits The annual base salary range for this position is $300,000–$400,000. Actual compensation will depend on experience, qualifications, skills, location, and other job-related factors. This role is eligible for equity and Terra AI’s benefits package, including medical, dental, vision, life insurance, FSA, and a 401(k) with company match. Applications may be submitted through the job posting; the application closing date will be provided when the role is published. Terra AI is an equal opportunity employer. We make employment decisions based on qualifications, merit, and business needs, without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, creed, age, disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex, gender, pregnancy or related medical conditions, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, reproductive health decision-making, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law. We’re committed to building a workplace where people with different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives can do their best work. Terra AI also provides reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants and employees with disabilities. If you need an accommodation during the application or interview process, please let us know.