VP of Engineering at Terraai in Redwood City Office

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, Pr