Founding Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $140K – $210K • Offers Equity • Offers Commission

Employment Type: FullTime

Founding Engineer

Terac helps teams reach faster research breakthroughs through our marketplace of verified experts. We are building agents to recruit, verify, and match 10,000s experts with 1000s of opportunities from the worlds most innovative organizations.

We work with leading enterprises and are backed by top investors.

The Role

You will:

• Own and scale the recruitment engine, the algorithm that finds any niche audience in the world through network traversal targeted ads, referrals, automated outbound, and anything else you can come up with.

• Build and extend the Terac API that research tooling companies and AI data companies integrate against.

• Ship the AI moderator, our voice agent that screens candidates, evaluates long-horizon tasks, detects cheating, and handles multi-language conversations.

• Build marketplace systems: opportunity routing, pricing optimization, expert LTV modeling, and feasibility estimation.

• Design the expert network experience, including onboarding flows, opportunity matching, payouts, and trust systems that make experts want to stay on the platform.

• Work directly with the CTO to shape technical direction across Next.js, TypeScript, tRPC, Drizzle, Neon Postgres, LiveKit, and the Vercel AI SDK.

You are:

• A high-agency builder with 3+ years of fullstack experience.

• Fluent in modern web stacks (TypeScript, React, Postgres).

• Experienced with LLMs, voice AI, or AI SDKs (Vercel AI SDK, Gemini, LiveKit).

• Excited by marketplace dynamics like matching, routing, pricing, and network effects.

• Maybe a former founder or lead who is hungry to build again.

Why now:

• We are at the inflection point, shifting from a research tool into a platform company with 10+ API integrations launching in the next quarter.

• The human data market for AI training is exploding and we have the recruitment infrastructure already built.

• You would be joining a 10-person team with 9M in funding and a growing base of happy customers.

Misc

• We operate in-person six days per week in our downtown SF office

• Compensation: Competitive salary, menaingful equity vested over four years, $10K relocation bonus (for moving to the Bay Area), and an additional $5k housing bonus (if you move within 0.5 miles of our office), Health, Dental, Vision insurance, 401(k) with company match

• Terac culture: Between weekly presentations, company hackathons, and an AI-first mindset, you will be working with one of the most innovative teams on the planet.

• Growth opportunities: You are joining Terac at one of the earliest stages and will have an opportunity to shape and grow with the company as a founding member.