Terra AI
VP of Engineering
$300K–$400K
Redwood City Office · On-site · Director · Full-time · Posted Oct 13, 2026
- Education
- A research doctorate is not required.
About the job
Build Terra AI’s engineering function and turn research prototypes into reliable, reusable backend technology that can be integrated into enterprise products.
What you'll do
- Build and lead the technology-development organization, including hiring, team design, leadership development, and operating practices.
- Own architecture and the process for maturing research-derived capabilities into tested, maintainable, scalable systems.
- Partner with Research, Product, and Platform on technical priorities, interfaces, delivery standards, and tradeoffs in performance, reliability, and cost.
What they ask for
- Demonstrated experience taking novel technical, algorithmic, or scientific capabilities from research or early prototype to robust systems deployed in real-world environments.
- Track record of building an engineering function, including recruiting, team design, management practices, and developing engineering leaders.
- Deep software and systems architecture judgment, plus experience working between research or advanced algorithm teams and product engineering.
- Strong AI/ML fluency, including model limitations and training and inference constraints; research doctorate not required.
Nice to have
- Experience with technically novel scientific or physical-world systems, such as robotics, autonomy, simulation, computational biology, scientific AI, or advanced modeling.
- Evidence of helping a technical capability and its organization evolve through early versions.
Pay
$300,000–$400,000 USD base salary
AI focus
Translate AI/ML and scientific research prototypes into dependable, reproducible, testable, and scalable engineered systems; guide model-related tradeoffs and collaborate with researchers on priorities.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative