{"id":18235,"url":"https://alion.io/job/terac-founding-engineer","title":"Founding Engineer","company":{"id":5329,"name":"Terac","domain":"terac.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/terac","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":7,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":31,"computed_at":"2026-11-01T06:10:25Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"middle","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":140000,"max":210000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":210000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Next.js","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"React.js","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-12-17T08:09:53Z","employer_posted_date":"2025-12-17","last_verified_at":"2026-11-01T19:57:46Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":319,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":318},"description":"Founding Engineer\nTerac 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.\nThe role\nWe’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.\nWithin your first month, we expect you to understand the product end to end and independently investigate, build, and ship improvements wherever they’re needed.\nYou will\nOwn 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.\n\nBuild and extend the Terac API that research tooling companies and AI data companies integrate against.\n\nBuild 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.\n\nBuild 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.\n\nDesign 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.\n\nOwn 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.\n\nWork 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.\n\nYou are\nA builder with 3+ years of full-stack experience who has taken ambiguous problems from investigation through to a working product.\n\nFluent in TypeScript, React, and Postgres, and comfortable learning an unfamiliar part of the stack when the work calls for it.\n\nExperienced with LLMs, voice AI agents, or evals.\n\nEffective with AI coding tools. You use them to move quickly and take responsibility for understanding, reviewing, and testing what you ship.\n\nExcited by marketplace dynamics like matching, routing, pricing, and network effects.\n\nComfortable 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.\n\nWhy now\nWe are at the inflection point, shifting from a research tool into a platform company with 10+ API integrations launching in the next quarter.\n\nThe human data market for AI training is exploding and we have the recruitment infrastructure already built.\n\nYou would be joining a 10-person team with 9M in funding and a growing base of happy customers.\n\nWorking at Terac\nCompensation: 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\n\nTerac 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.\n\nGrowth 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4051,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":3,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Growth opportunities","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Market Research","AI Training Data & Annotation"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2025-12-17T08:09:53Z"},{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-26T05:02:36Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":6,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.223,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":318,"expected_fill_days":31,"reasons":["conf:2","velocity","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-11-01T06:10:25Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":210000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/terac-founding-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/terac-founding-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-01T22:39:57Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":34413,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-02T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":5329},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=5329"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fterac-founding-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fterac-founding-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fterac-founding-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/terac-founding-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fterac-founding-engineer"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":18235}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"terac.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":18235},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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