---
title: 'Full Stack Engineer, Scientific Modeling Tools at Terra AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/full-stack-engineer-scientific-modeling-tools-terra-ai-united-states-9kb5cydx1s7y'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Full Stack Engineer, Scientific Modeling Tools at Terra AI

- **Company:** Terra AI
- **Location:** United States
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-01-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/terraai/940f76ee-e3db-47d1-bd63-2d27264265bd

## Job description

Terra AI is building a new category at the intersection of artificial intelligence, geoscience, and critical resource development.

As global demand for copper, lithium, nickel, rare earth elements, geothermal energy, and other strategic resources accelerates, the mining and subsurface industries face a growing challenge: traditional exploration methods remain slow, expensive, and highly uncertain. Terra AI was founded to help solve this problem by redefining how critical resources are discovered, evaluated, and developed.

By combining advanced machine learning, probabilistic modeling, and deep geoscience expertise, Terra AI helps exploration and mining companies make faster, more informed subsurface decisions with greater confidence and capital efficiency. The company’s platform integrates geological, geophysical, and drilling data into intelligent systems designed to improve targeting accuracy, accelerate discovery timelines, and reduce exploration risk.

Backed by leading investors including Khosla Ventures and working alongside strategic industry partners including Rio Tinto, Ero Copper, and Ramaco Resources, Terra AI is emerging as one of the more closely watched AI-native companies operating within the mining and critical minerals sector.

Terra AI’s mission is to define the new global standard for data-driven critical resource development — breaking the cost and time curve required to support electrification, energy security, and the global energy transition.

The company operates with a strong partnership mentality, combining technical rigor, candid communication, continual learning, and environmental stewardship to help modern exploration teams solve some of the world’s most important resource challenges.

## Role

Productionize and extend internal modeling tools used to generate subsurface outputs. You will take software built around scientific workflows and make it robust, maintainable, and easier to run, inspect, and extend. This role is for someone who can bridge product-quality engineering with scientific computing. This team is building a durable foundation for multiple scientific domains, including geophysics and reservoir simulation. Candidates may lean toward one or the other, but the core engineering shape is the same.

## What you’ll do

- Collaborate closely with domain experts to translate requirements into software that is correct, usable, and extensible.
- Own and improve internal modeling stacks, including:
- Refactoring and modularization for clarity and reuse
- Testing strategies that match scientific software realities (golden tests, invariants, property-based testing where useful)
- Performance profiling and optimization where it matters
- Documentation and developer experience improvements
- Design and implement APIs and interfaces that turn working examples into maintainable components.
- Build configuration management patterns that make runs reproducible and debuggable.
- Implement and maintain orchestration pipelines for simulation ensembles and data validation.
- Work primarily in Python and Julia.
- Integrate with ML-adjacent components and artifacts (inputs, outputs, model wrappers), without being responsible for inventing new ML methods.

## Requirements

- Strong software engineering fundamentals and proven ability to take ownership of complex codebases.
- Production-grade Python skills.
- Comfort working in Julia or willingness to go deep quickly.
- Experience designing APIs, handling configuration, and building reliable execution paths for complex workflows.
- Familiarity with performance profiling and optimization tooling.
- Familiarity with ML frameworks at an integration level (PyTorch preferred, TensorFlow or JAX also relevant), including artifacts, I/O, and runtime concerns.
- Experience with orchestration or workflow tooling (Flyte, Prefect, Dagster, or similar), or equivalent patterns built in-house.

## Nice to have

- Geophysics or geomodeling experience, including survey simulation or related tooling (SimPEG or similar).
- Reservoir simulation experience (Eclipse, Intersect, JutulDarcy, or similar).
- Experience solving PDE-based problems in HPC environments.
- Familiarity with Fortran or C++ codebases common in scientific stacks.
- Experience in simulation, CAD, CFD, or other engineering/scientific software domains.
- Experience supporting scientific users and workflows, where communication and shared language matter.
- Experience with batch pipelines and data-intensive systems.

## About Terra AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Terra AI uses patented, purpose-built AI to model subsurface uncertainty and optimize drill planning for mining, geothermal, and carbon storage projects, accelerating the discovery of critical natural resources.
- **Entity Type**: Private (early-stage, founded 2023; funding stage not publicly disclosed)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, USA (with an office in Sunnyvale, CA and remote options)
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: John Mern (CEO, Co-founder), Markus Zechner (CTO, Co-founder), Anthony Corso (Co-founder), and a General Manager of Reservoirs (Co-founder, name not publicly listed)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Natural resources exploration (mining, energy, geothermal, carbon storage) powered by artificial intelligence
- **Target customers**: Mining and energy companies (B2B, enterprise), including mine developers, reservoir engineers, and investors in critical mineral supply chains
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Accelerating exploration to meet energy transition needs” and “turn subsurface uncertainty into better decisions” to bring critical resources to markets faster

## Products & Services
- **Terra AI Platform**: A SaaS/AI platform that characterizes deposits, quantifies uncertainty, and optimizes drill planning. It answers questions like “Where should we drill to reduce the most resource uncertainty?” and “What is the possible range of net present values?”. The platform claims to deliver a 2.5x increase in resource definition vs. traditional methods and 50-60% fewer drilling meters throughout exploration.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – Not disclosed (company is private, no funding rounds reported in public sources)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not listed in available sources (likely early-stage, no investor details public)
- **Growth Signals**: Founded in 2023 and already actively hiring across multiple senior roles (ML Engineer, Geologist, Geophysicist, Business Development, etc.). The company targets a critical bottleneck in mineral supply – post-discovery exploration – which is seeing increased demand from clean energy, defense, and AI-driven growth.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Patented, purpose-built AI** for subsurface uncertainty modeling, not generic data visualization
- **Decision-focused platform** that quantifies financial risk (e.g., net present value ranges) and reduces drilling costs by 50-60%
- **Founding team with deep domain expertise**: PhDs from Stanford in Aeronautics & Astronautics, Petroleum Engineering, and AI; experience at Kobold Metals, Boeing, and Stanford Center for AI Safety
- **Bridges academia and industry**: CTO Markus Zechner is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford; Anthony Corso is a visiting scholar at Stanford

## Strategic Focus
- Accelerate and de-risk post-discovery exploration for critical minerals, geothermal, and carbon storage
- Expand adoption among mining and energy companies to reduce the “exploration bottleneck” and boost downstream industries
- Grow the team of geoscientists, AI researchers, and engineers to build the subsurface foundation for a clean energy future
- Target both mining and reservoir (oil & gas, geothermal, carbon storage) verticals

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**: Mission-driven to solve a critical climate challenge; team of AI PhDs, geophysicists, and engineers; flat structure with a focus on innovation
- **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: Mostly remote (US-based) with some roles labeled “hybrid” or “on-site” in Palo Alto/Sunnyvale. The company has two locations (Palo Alto HQ and Sunnyvale) and offers remote flexibility.
- **Notable perks** (from careers page):
  - Company-subsidized medical, dental & vision insurance
  - 401k plan with company matching
  - Flexible PTO plus company holidays
  - Annual company-wide winter break (December 24 – January 1)
  - Paid parental leave
  - One-time home-office set up stipend
  - Professional development budget (conferences, events)
  - Mental health support (if not covered by insurance)
- **Engineering culture**: Emphasis on AI/ML, scientific computing, and geoscience; open roles for Senior/Staff ML Engineers, ML Researchers, Computational Scientists, and Software Engineers

## Sources
1. [Terra AI Website](https://www.terraai.com/)
2. [Terra AI About Page](https://www.terraai.com/about)
3. [Terra AI Careers Page](https://www.terraai.com/careers)
4. [Built In Terra AI Profile](https://builtin.com/company/terra-ai)

## Other roles at Terra AI

- [Head of Commercial](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-commercial-terra-ai-redwood-city-agvrmzd5zcqr) — Redwood City, CA
- [Business Development Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-manager-terra-ai-redwood-city-w514ga8cgqm5) — Redwood City, CA
- [Business Development Representative](https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-representative-terra-ai-redwood-city-m8s0xj517n5h) — Redwood City, CA
- [Senior Geologist](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-geologist-terra-ai-redwood-city-vh6xke8pccp4) — Redwood City, CA
- [Senior/Staff Machine Learning Researcher](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-machine-learning-researcher-terra-ai-united-states-3a2nqw2w8q4q) — United States
- [Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-machine-learning-engineer-terra-ai-united-states-zqdv6yc45mf0) — United States