Founding Engineer

New Yesterday

tl;dr Build the search engine for human thought.
Background Most of the world’s knowledge isn’t online, it’s inside people’s heads. Terac is building an AI-powered interview engine that scales deep human conversations into actionable insights. Companies use Terac to replace slow, manxual research with AI-moderated interviews that run 1,000+ conversations in parallel and return answers to customers within hours. Terac: Designs interviews.
Finds the right participants.
Conducts interviews.
Analyzes the responses.
Fortune 500 companies spend hundreds of millions on consultants to do this. Terac automates it.
Why join Terac? We're building what comes after search: Google indexes what’s online. Terac indexes what’s in people’s heads. Our AI agents interview real humans at scale and return structured insights in hours, not weeks. This is a data frontier: Every company needs faster, deeper access to real human insight. We’re already seeing pull from research, CX, product, and GTM teams. As engineering becomes automated, the last moat will become human connection. It’s a massive, obvious market: Every product, research, marketing, and strategy team on earth needs better answers, and they’re already reaching out to us. We closed multiple contracts within 2 months of starting. We move fast: We built out the core product, got our first paid contracts, and closed a $1M pre-seed all within 2 months of quitting our jobs.
Technical Challenges Realtime interviews: We're building voice and video enabled AI agents that moderate conversations with real humans at scale. These agents must listen actively, reason in real time, follow up intelligently, and produce structured, usable output. This involves latency-aware LLM orchestration, streaming transcription, emotional intelligence, and robust fallback logic when things go off-script. People Search: One of our superpowers is finding the right people to talk to. We're building a dynamic, evolving people graph that indexes expertise, behavior, and intent which enables pinpoint recruitment for research without relying on static panels. This includes crawling, enrichment, semantic matching, and feedback loops that learn from every interview. Researcher Agent: We’re replacing expensive, slow research workflows with an always-on AI researcher. Our agents don’t just ask questions. They understand goals, adapt interviews accordingly, and synthesize what they’ve heard into summaries, tags, and recommendations. This is a high-stakes, multi-layer reasoning challenge that combines tool use, memory, and LLM judgment.
What we're looking for Owner-mentality engineers: You want to own core architecture, influence product direction, and help shape company culture. Deep technical skill: You’ve built complex systems end-to-end, ideally in real-time streaming, agentic workflows, or AI infrastructure. Curiosity about people: You’re as interested in how users think as how models work. You want to build tools that amplify both. Speed with intent: You ship fast but don’t hack blindly. You know when to use the right abstraction and when to move.
Our team is a tight-knit group of second time technical founders with deep experience across AI and infrastructure. We work to win. Compensation Range: $125K - $300K
Apply
Location:
San Francisco
Salary:
$125,000 - $300,000 per year
Category:
Engineering

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