Founding Engineer
Terac, San Francisco
- Pay
- $140K–$210K / year
- Work type
- Onsite
- Level
- Not stated
- Area
- Software engineering
- Posted
- Dec 17, 2025
About the role
FOUNDING ENGINEER
As a founding engineer, you're building the engine that matches every person on earth to the work they're meant to do. This page covers why Terac exists, what you'll own and how we work.
WHY TERAC EXISTS
Terac stands for The Efficient Resource Allocation Company. Before Uber, you stuck your thumb out and prayed a car would stop. Uber allocated rides efficiently and created opportunity for millions of drivers along the way. Labor is the largest resource in the world, and it's still allocated by luck.
Think about how you got every job you've had. You bumped into the right person at the right time. Most people on earth aren't in the job they'd be best at, and so much talent overseas is completely blocked from work it could do tomorrow.
We believe the best way to change someone's life is to give them work that pays them and fulfills them. We're building the engine that understands people 10 to 100 times deeper than their resume and routes them to the work they're best at.
AI training and market research are where we start, because they're the fastest feedback loop on labor: we know whether a match worked in minutes, not months. The tasks will keep changing. Understanding people and allocating them well is the part that lasts.
WHERE WE ARE TODAY
Ten months ago we were five people paying experts maybe $20K a year. Experts have now earned more than $3.4M on Terac, working for frontier AI labs and Fortune 500 companies.
We've raised $16M from Emergence Capital, SignalFire, SV Angel and others.
THE ROLE
Everyone here works across the whole product. In one week you might improve expert onboarding, debug a payout, tune a recruitment agent and extend a customer integration.
You'll work closely with our Research Customers, Domain Experts, and Strategic Project Leads (SPLs), the people who run customer projects day to day. You find what matters most, build it and take it to production yourself.
Everything you ship touches a real person's work, data or money. When the matching gets better, someone lands better work. When a payout breaks, someone can't pay rent.
WHAT YOU'LL OWN
- The on-demand recruitment engine. Find any niche audience in the world through network traversal, targeted ads, referrals, automated outbound and anything else you can come up with.
- Labor profiles and calibration. The exams, paid trials and work signals that show how someone actually works: how fast they start, how careful they are, whether they keep their commitments. Starting within 6 hours of approval already predicts a great expert better than any resume or screener verdict. Make that understanding deeper.
- Matching and the marketplace. Opportunity matching, pricing, feasibility estimates, repeat engagement and long-term contract roles. Use what every finished project teaches us to recruit and match better.
- Agents. The expert agent that answers experts over text and chat, the AI voice screener, and the agents that assess work, catch fraud and help our team run projects. Measure them with real users and make their actions reliable and reviewable.
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Listed on Terac's Ashby job board; checked 23 h ago. First seen by us 24 h ago. Being listed doesn't mean the team is actively interviewing. We found this board in a public directory and haven't yet confirmed it against the company's own careers page.