---
title: 'Lab Intern at Terranova'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/lab-intern-terranova-berkeley-xrn1m8a3dbkh'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-14'
---

# Lab Intern at Terranova

- **Company:** Terranova
- **Location:** Berkeley, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-14
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/terranova/fad001fb-2d4c-4a9c-b0da-b3161d66eacd

## Job description

Lab Intern Company Description Backed by leading climate and American dynamism investors, Terranova builds intelligent robotic systems to terraform the Earth itself — lifting land, restoring wetlands, and protecting critical infrastructure from floods and sea-level rise. Our mission is to preserve the built environment, create new habitats, and usher in an era of abundance. Our work supports climate resilience, disaster recovery, and defense across the United States and beyond. We're assembling a world-class team that wants to work on something real, physical, and civilization-scale. If you want your work to reshape the world — literally — this is the place to do it. What to Expect We're seeking a lab intern to support our engineering team in testing, validating, and iterating on the robotic systems that power Terranova's work. You'll spend your time hands-on in the lab — running experiments, maintaining test rigs, collecting and logging data, and helping turn engineering designs into working hardware. It's a chance to see how a physical product gets built and proven out, from bench test to field-ready system.

## Key Responsibilities

- Set up, run, and monitor lab experiments and hardware tests in support of the engineering team
- Maintain, calibrate, and troubleshoot lab equipment, test rigs, and sensor instrumentation
- Collect, organize, and log test data, and help summarize results for engineers
- Assist with prototyping, assembly, and basic fabrication of hardware components
- Support integration and validation testing as systems move from bench to field
- Document lab procedures, test setups, and findings for the team
- Follow lab safety protocols and help keep the workspace organized and running smoothly

## Requirements

- Comfortable with the pace and intensity of early-stage startup life
- Working towards a bachelor's degree or higher in Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Biology, Biomedical Engineering, or a related field
- Comfortable in a lab environment
- U.S. permanent residency required

## Preferred Skills and Experience

- Hands-on wet lab experience
- Experience with environmental or materials testing — soil, sediment, water quality, corrosion, or durability
- Familiarity with lab instrumentation (pH meters, spectrophotometers, GC/HPLC, microscopy)
- Basic data analysis skills (Excel, Python, or MATLAB) for processing experimental data
- Background in materials science, polymers, or composites a plus
- Coursework or project experience in environmental, geotechnical, or fluid systems a bonus
- Strong lab safety practices and attention to detail
- Comfortable with fieldwork or sample collection outside the lab

## Compensation and Timeline

- $25–35/hr, plus relocation and company perks
- Fall internship, September through December, with flexibility around your school schedule

## About Terranova

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Terranova builds car-sized terraforming robots that inject a wood slurry deep underground to lift land out of flood zones, providing permanent elevation without surface disturbance.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: Berkeley, California, United States
- **Founded**: Not publicly available
- **Founders**: Trip Allen (CEO/Executive Chairman), Laurence Allen (Forward-Deployed CEO)

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: Robotics Engineering, Climate Adaptation, Construction Technology
- Target customers: Real estate developers, infrastructure contractors, government agencies, defense organizations, and wetland conservation groups operating in flood-prone regions
- Mission or purpose statement: “To terraform the earth and usher in a new era of resilience and societal abundance” — Laurence Allen, CEO

## Products & Services
- **Terraforming Robot System**: A fleet of three car-sized injection robots and one “mothership” that can lift one acre by one foot per day. The robots inject a wood slurry deep underground to permanently elevate land with minimal surface disturbance.
- **Site Suitability Predictor**: An AI-driven tool that analyzes soil composition and flood risk to determine optimal project locations.
- **AI Injection Campaign Designer**: Machine learning reasoning models that design the precise injection pattern needed to achieve a desired surface topology.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: $25.1 million (post-seed round)
- **Key Metric**: $7 million in seed funding (closed three times oversubscribed)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Outlander VC (co-lead), Congruent Ventures (co-lead), GoAhead Ventures, Gothams, Ponderosa (Galvanize Climate fund), and angels including Palmer Luckey
- **Growth Signals**: Emerging from stealth in 2025 with a $7M seed round; targeting costs up to an order of magnitude less than levees or seawalls; actively hiring across robotics, embedded systems, and business development roles

## Competitive Advantages
- **Cost advantage**: Targeting costs up to 10x cheaper than traditional levees or seawalls
- **Speed**: Projects completed in 2–8 weeks versus 3–36 months for conventional methods
- **Minimal environmental impact**: Uses waste biomass (wood slurry) as fill; no surface disturbance; minimal ecological disruption compared to surface fill or seawalls
- **Permanent solution**: Elevation is permanent, providing proactive flood protection rather than reactive defense
- **Unique technology moat**: Proprietary combination of heavy robotics, geotechnical engineering, and AI/ML for subsurface injection

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling from prototype to full-scale production of robot systems
- Beginning first commercial elevation projects in flood-prone regions (e.g., San Rafael, CA)
- Growing core engineering and field deployment teams
- Expanding into multiple verticals: real estate development, infrastructure, defense, mining, and wetlands restoration

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Mission-driven climate tech startup tackling a massive global problem (flooding costs the U.S. economy over $180B/year)
- **Work model**: In-office, based in Berkeley, CA (HQ) with a secondary office in Miami Beach, FL
- **Team size**: ~22 employees (as of mid-2025); tight-knit, early-stage environment
- **Engineering focus**: Heavy emphasis on robotics, controls, embedded systems, and mechanical engineering — a hardware-heavy startup building physical robots
- **Recent job openings**: Robotics Controls Engineer, Embedded Systems Engineer, Senior Mechanical Engineer, Director of Business Development, and multiple intern positions
- **Growth trajectory**: Early-stage with strong investor backing and clear product-market fit; opportunity to shape the company’s technical direction and culture

## Sources
1. [terranova.inc](https://www.terranova.inc/)
2. [LinkedIn - Terranova](https://www.linkedin.com/company/terranova-inc)
3. [Built In - Terranova Careers](https://builtin.com/company/terranova)
4. [The Robot Report - Seed Funding](https://www.therobotreport.com/terranova-gets-seed-funding-deploy-terraforming-robots/)
5. [Ashby Jobs Page](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Terranova)

## Other roles at Terranova

- [Mechanical Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/mechanical-engineer-terranova-berkeley-4m3dv96n0e1v) — Berkeley, CA
- [Software Engineering Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineering-intern-terranova-berkeley-86ykdj3chn6h) — Berkeley, CA
- [Government Programs & Proposal Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/government-programs-proposal-lead-terranova-berkeley-n690j5n0b6j8) — Berkeley, CA
- [Shop Apprentice](https://feeny.ai/job/shop-apprentice-terranova-berkeley-wqahb12mtsqa) — Berkeley, CA
- [Mechanical/Test Engineering Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/mechanical-test-engineering-intern-terranova-berkeley-m8yaxgtmxsy2) — Berkeley, CA
- [Drop Out Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/drop-out-engineer-terranova-berkeley-ab6wbn6gz4y6) — Berkeley, CA
- [VP of Ops](https://feeny.ai/job/vp-of-ops-terranova-berkeley-8mzfk1d3knkn) — Berkeley, CA
- [Forward Deployed Operator](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-operator-terranova-berkeley-q7a8f9f0nx69) — Berkeley, CA
- [Controls/Robotics Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/controls-robotics-intern-terranova-berkeley-jxm04qgs5vck) — Berkeley, CA
- [Embedded Systems Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/embedded-systems-intern-terranova-berkeley-9xhyfdx9g665) — Berkeley, CA