--- title: 'VP of Ops at Terranova' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/vp-of-ops-terranova-berkeley-8mzfk1d3knkn' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-07' --- # VP of Ops at Terranova - **Company:** Terranova - **Location:** Berkeley, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-07-01 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/terranova/06aba993-8576-4ed9-be30-173e7502765a/application **Skills:** Operations Management, Strategic Planning, Financial Management, Recruiting, Project Management, Field Operations, Engineering Management, Deep Tech Operations, Robotics, Aerospace, Defense, Infrastructure, Hardware Startup Experience, Fundraising, Finance > The COO will function as a true company operator, owning execution across engineering, field operations, manufacturing, recruiting, finance, and customer delivery. This cofounder-level role requires leading from the front, running a tight operating cadence, and managing a high-intensity technical team to drive fiel... ## Job description ## About Terranova Backed by leading deep tech VCs, Terranova builds intelligent robotic systems to terraform the Earth itself - lifting land, restoring wetlands, and protecting critical infrastructure from floods. 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, housing development, 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 are looking for a COO or a VP Operations who can function as a true company operator: owning execution across engineering, field operations, manufacturing, recruiting, finance, customer delivery, and internal systems. This is a cofounder-level role at a very early company. This person will lead from the front, run an extremely tight operating cadence, and make sure the hundreds of things required to keep projects moving get done. The upside is meaningful equity, ownership, and the chance to help build one of the defining hard-tech companies of the next decade. ## Key Responsibilities ● Own company-wide execution across engineering, operations, deployments, hiring, finance, procurement, legal coordination, and customer delivery. ● Build and run the operating system of the company: weekly cadence, project plans, dashboards, accountability loops, and decision-making processes. ● Manage and motivate a high-intensity technical team while earning credibility with engineers, field operators, and founders. ● Drive field deployments from planning through completion, ensuring projects do not slip because of logistics, staffing, materials, permitting, vendors, or customer coordination. ● Work directly with the CEO to support fundraising, board communication, strategic planning, and company priorities. ● Support GTM and customer execution across PE firms, developers, infrastructure owners, government agencies, USACE, and other defense-adjacent customers. ● Recruit, evaluate, and help close exceptional talent across technical, operational, and commercial roles. ● Thrive at the pace and intensity of early-stage startup life, including long days, and field hours when needed. ## Requirements ● Exceptional operational judgment, intensity, and ownership. ● Experience leading strategy, operations, deployment, product, or company-building functions at a high-growth deep tech, robotics, aerospace, defense, infrastructure, or hardware startup. ● Ability to manage technical teams and make high-quality decisions around complex engineering and field operations, even without being the deepest technical expert in the room. ● Strong comfort with customers, investors, board members, vendors, and government / defense stakeholders. ● Willingness to work on-site in Berkeley, CA. ● U.S. work authorization. We cannot sponsor H-1B visas at this time. ## Preferred Skills & Experience ● Prior experience as a VP / Director / Head of Strategy or Operations at a deep tech company. ● Prior experience as a COO, CPO, CTO, VP Ops, or GM experience at a Series B or later hardware startup. ● Experience deploying products that are hard to sell and hard to build. ● Founder or founder-level operating experience. Important to have seen 0->1. ● Strong finance, strategic planning, and fundraising fluency. Ideal Archetype ● A high-aptitude operator 3-15 years into their career who has already scaled unusually fast. They need to be the smartest person at our company. Wicked, cunning, fluent in the dark arts, blurry in pictures. ● Someone who could plausibly be a founder, but who chooses our rocket ship over starting from zero. ● Has built or run something real in robotics, aerospace, defense, infrastructure, construction tech, or complex hardware. ● Can walk into a messy early-stage company, create order, raise the bar, and make everyone more intense and effective. ● Has enough technical taste to manage engineers, enough commercial judgment to help sell, and enough operational force to keep the whole machine moving. ● Comes from a flagship deep tech company, an Elon-founded company, or a serious venture-backed hardware company. We are optimizing for aptitude, intensity, and company pedigree over title. ## 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 - [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