---
title: 'Software Engineering Intern at Terranova'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineering-intern-terranova-berkeley-86ykdj3chn6h'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Software Engineering Intern at Terranova

- **Company:** Terranova
- **Location:** Berkeley, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-07
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/terranova/a8e5a8d2-4af3-4736-b66e-e0804447f7a0

## Job description

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 to Expect

We are seeking a software engineering intern who can design and maintain modern, scalable applications while owning our cloud and infrastructure layer. You’ll build responsive user interfaces, develop backend APIs, and architect deployments that can scale globally. You’ll thrive if you’ve worked on platform or infra teams (Cloudflare, Vercel, AWS) or as a product engineer at performance-oriented orgs (Stripe, Notion, etc.). Check out plan.terranova.inc http://plan.terranova.inc for an idea of some of the web dev stuff you'll need to develop.

## What You’ll Do

- Design and implement performant, maintainable web apps powered by Vue / Nuxt / TypeScript, and backends written in NestJS, Rust, or Go.
- Build and operate distributed backends with Postgres, TimescaleDB, and a desire to work with serverless constraints.
- Implement CI/CD, automated testing, observability, and incident-response workflows, a'la Sentry or DataDog.
- Collaborate with product and robotics teams to integrate data, telemetry, and control interfaces.
- Build customer facing and internal tools
- Full stack application development
- Comfortable with the pace and intensity of early-stage startup life
- Working towards a bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science or related field
- U.S. permanent residency required
- Ability to be on-site part-time required

## Preferred Skills and Experience

- History of making stuff - hobby projects, industry experience
- TypeScript
- Vue/Nuxt.js
- NestJS/Rust/Go
- Postgres/TimescaleDB/queues
- GitHub Actions/Argo
- OpenTelemetry/DataDog/Sentry
- iOS and Android app development, with a focus on cross-platform programming

## Compensation and Timeline

- $20-28/hr + relocation + company perks
- Fall internship from September- December depending on your 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
- [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
- [Embedded Systems Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/embedded-systems-engineer-terranova-berkeley-4qhqhpd8pqxx) — Berkeley, CA