VP of Engineering - AI Platforms & Scale

Terra AI; Redwood City (CA); Hybrid; USD 300,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

401(k) match

Healthcare benefits

Job summary

Terra AI, based in Redwood City, California, is seeking a VP of Engineering to translate cutting-edge research into scalable backend systems. You will shape architectures, set interfaces, recruit top engineers, and implement disciplined delivery practices across Research, Product, and Platform teams.

This is a full-time hybrid leadership role requiring strong AI/ML fluency, executive communication, and a track record of building durable engineering organizations capable of maturing novel

Qualifications

• Proven experience maturing novel technical capabilities into deployable systems.
• Experience building and leading an engineering function with hiring and processes.
• Strong software and systems architecture judgment across backend services.

Responsibilities

• Build Terra AI’s engineering organization with early hiring and leadership development.
• Own architecture for research-derived capabilities and reusable components.
• Establish a maturation process from research to engineering with milestones and tests.
• Institute rigorous benchmarking, testing, observability, and reliability practices.
• Balance model quality, latency, compute, data needs, and deployment complexity.
• Define contracts so engineered capabilities integrate into enterprise products.
• Remain hands-on through architecture reviews and mentoring.
• Develop leaders to sustain the engineering function without heroics.

Skills

Engineering leadership

AI/ML fluency

Executive communication

Talent judgment

Ambiguity tolerance

Education

Advanced degree in CS/Math

Tools

ML systems

Job description

Terra AI, based in Redwood City, California, is seeking a VP of Engineering to translate cutting-edge research into scalable backend systems. You will shape architectures, set interfaces, recruit top engineers, and implement disciplined delivery practices across Research, Product, and Platform teams.

This is a full-time hybrid leadership role requiring strong AI/ML fluency, executive communication, and a track record of building durable engineering organizations capable of maturing novel