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.
Skills Required
- Exceptional operational judgment, intensity, and ownership
- Experience leading strategy, operations, deployment, product, or company-building at high-growth deep tech, robotics, aerospace, defense, infrastructure, or hardware startups
- Ability to manage technical teams and make high-quality decisions around complex engineering and field operations
- Strong comfort engaging customers, investors, board members, vendors, and government/defense stakeholders
- Willingness to work on-site in Berkeley, CA
- U.S. work authorization (employer cannot sponsor H-1B visas)
- Thrive at early-stage startup pace including long days, 6-day workweeks, and field hours when needed
- VP / Director / Head of Strategy or Operations experience at flagship deep tech company
- COO, CPO, CTO, VP Ops, or GM experience at Series B or later hardware startup
- Experience at intense robotics/hard-tech companies (e.g., SpaceX, Anduril, Zipline, Tesla)
- Experience selling or deploying hard-to-sell, hard-to-build products and working with defense/infrastructure/government customers
- Founder or founder-level operating experience (0->1)
- Strong finance, strategic planning, and fundraising fluency
What We Do
Terranova is rewriting the adaptation playbook by reshaping terrain itself. We do this with robots the size of cars that inject a wood slurry deep underground. This terraforming process precisely lifts properties out of their flood zones with no surface disturbance. This elevation is permanent and provides proactive protection for all types of infrastructure, wetlands, and new development projects. Our three robot and one mothership system can lift an acre by a foot every day, enabling rapid post-flood recovery. Please contact us at [email protected] for a quote on your elevation project.
