Founding Engineer
At a glance
Mid-level Software Engineering role at Terac. San Francisco · full-time · $140,000–$210,000 base.
techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Improve expert recruitment through network discovery, targeted ads, referrals and automated outreach
- Build the API used by research and AI data companies, plus agents that screen experts and flag fraud
- Develop marketplace tools for matching, pricing and feasibility, using completed projects to refine recruitment
- Create expert flows for onboarding, project work and payouts, fixing friction with input from users and operations
- Trace production issues across the product, background tasks and external services, then strengthen reliability
What you bring
- At least three years building full-stack products and taking unclear problems from investigation through launch
- Strong TypeScript, React and Postgres skills, with the ability to pick up unfamiliar parts of the stack
- Hands-on experience with LLMs, voice-based AI agents or evaluation methods
- You use AI coding tools and review and test the work they help you produce
Who this fits
You’ll suit a broad ownership role where you work across the product, speak directly with users and make progress without detailed specifications. You’ll work closely with the CTO and operations team, and the role is based onsite in San Francisco. Relocation support is offered for a move to the Bay Area.
From the employer
Founding Engineer
Terac connects domain experts with paid work in research and AI. Our network has more than 160,000 registered experts. Research teams and AI companies use Terac to find people who can share their knowledge, evaluate AI systems, and contribute to ongoing projects. We build the software and agents that recruit, verify, match, and pay them.
The role
We’re a small team, and everyone works across the product. You might improve expert onboarding, debug a payout, build a recruitment agent, or extend a customer integration in the same week. You’ll work directly with the CTO and operations team to identify what needs attention and take it through to production.
Within your first month, we expect you to understand the product end to end and independently investigate, build, and ship improvements wherever they’re needed.
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.
Build and improve agents that screen experts through voice and chat, assess their work, identify fraud, and help our team run projects. Evaluate how they perform with real users and make their actions reliable and reviewable.
Build marketplace systems for opportunity matching, pricing, feasibility estimation, and repeat engagement. Use what we learn from completed projects to improve who we recruit and how we match them.
Design and build the expert experience, including onboarding, project instructions, ongoing work, and payouts. Work with experts and our operations team to understand where people get stuck and fix it.
Own the behavior of what you ship in production. Investigate failures across the product, background jobs, and external services, and improve the systems that handle people’s work, data, and money.
Work directly with the CTO to shape the architecture behind autonomous agents, real-time voice, and a global expert marketplace. Our core stack includes TypeScript, Next.js, Python, Postgres, and AWS.
You are
A builder with 3+ years of full-stack experience who has taken ambiguous problems from investigation through to a working product.
Fluent in TypeScript, React, and Postgres, and comfortable learning an unfamiliar part of the stack when the work calls for it.
Experienced with LLMs, voice AI agents, or evals.
Effective with AI coding tools. You use them to move quickly and take responsibility for understanding, reviewing, and testing what you ship.
Excited by marketplace dynamics like matching, routing, pricing, and network effects.
Comfortable working across the whole product, talking directly with users, and figuring out what to do without a detailed specification. You may have done this as a founder, an early engineer, or in another role with broad ownership.
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.
Working at Terac
Compensation: Competitive salary, meaningful 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: We share what we’re learning through weekly presentations and company hackathons. We use AI throughout our work and expect engineers to take initiative, learn the business, and follow through on what they ship.
Growth opportunities: As a founding engineer, you’ll help shape the product and technical decisions across the company. Your responsibilities will grow with the business and the problems you take on.
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