Founding Finance

About Terac

Terac is building the infrastructure for accessing human capability on demand. We are working toward a future where Terac deeply understands:

1. What every person is capable of, what they want, and where they can thrive

2. What work our customers need completed and what success requires

3. What creates a great match between the two

With this understanding, Terac can intelligently allocate human capability to the work where it creates the most value for both our experts and customers. Today, our initial wedge is providing specialized experts for AI training, evaluation, market research, and other expert-driven research.

We place 1,000s of experts per month and pay our experts, on average, over $90/hr. We're a team of 15 based in San Francisco, and we work with leading AI labs and research companies. We've raised $16M from Emergence, SV Angel, SignalFire, and more.

The problems we get to solve

Terac is a two-sided marketplace, and the most interesting problems live where the money moves.

• Pricing work we've never seen before. Every project is different (a cardiologist for a 30-minute interview, 200 Amharic transcribers, a team of licensed engineers building RL environments), and we have to quote it in hours, not weeks.

• Setting the right pay for experts. Rates vary by domain, country, and urgency. Pay too little and the best experts walk. Pay too much and the project stops working for the customer.

• Managing spread and take rate. The gap between what customers pay and what experts earn funds everything we build, and it looks different across market research, AI training, and data collection.

• Liquidity on both sides. The right experts available the moment a customer needs them, across thousands of niches, without burning out supply or overpromising to demand.

• Moving money globally. We pay experts across dozens of countries every month, often before customers pay us, which creates real working capital, FX, and fraud challenges.

About the role

Terac is growing fast. We pay thousands of experts across dozens of countries every month, invoice a growing roster of enterprise customers and AI labs, and are scaling revenue month over month. Today, finance is spread across the founders, our Chief of Staff, and outside providers.

You will be our first finance hire and own the function end to end, partnering directly with the CEO. You'll own the economics behind everything above: pricing, pay rates, margins, and cash. This is a strategic finance seat, not just a back-office one: you'll sit next to the people closing deals and running projects, and your models will shape what we sell, how we price it, and how fast we grow.

You thrive in ambiguity, have exceptional judgment, and are equally comfortable building a board-ready model and reconciling a payout batch.

You will:

• Own the numbers. Monthly close, accounting, revenue recognition, and reporting, working with our outside accountants and auditors.

• Run cash and payments. AR/AP, collections, and the global payout engine that pays thousands of experts every month across many countries and payment rails.

• Drive pricing and unit economics. Project-level margin analysis, quoting support for live deals, and the frameworks that set expert pay and customer pricing across business lines.

• Build planning and forecasting. Budgets, burn, hiring plans, revenue forecasts, and the operating model.

• Support fundraising and the board. Investor reporting, data rooms, and diligence for future rounds.

• Build the systems. Choose and implement tooling (ERP, billing, spend management, payroll) plus the rev ops and controls that let us scale 10x.

• Handle compliance. Sales tax, 1099s and international contractor compliance, insurance, and corporate filings with our legal partners.

You have:

• 3-7+ years in finance, ideally a mix of investing, banking, consulting, or Big 4 and a high-growth startup

• Hands-on experience owning close, cash management, and financial modeling

• Comfort building systems from scratch and working with ambiguous, messy data

• Strong judgment and the ability to prioritize under pressure

You likely have experience in:

• Finance at an early-stage or high-growth startup, often as the first or second finance hire, ideally through multiple funding rounds

• Marketplaces, fintech, payments, or businesses with high-volume global payouts

• Finance roles that blend into product ops or rev ops

How we work

• In person. We work together in our San Francisco office, Monday through Friday during reasonable hours, and remotely on weekends.

• AI everywhere. We use AI throughout our work and expect you to as well.

• Learn out loud. We share what we're learning in weekly presentations and company hackathons.

Compensation and benefits

• Salary: competitive salary.

• Equity: meaningful equity, vesting over four years.

• Moving here: a $10K relocation bonus to move to the Bay Area, and $5K more if you live within half a mile of the office.

• Benefits: health, dental and vision insurance, and a 401(k) with company match.

• Meals: we cover all meals in the office.

• Growth: you're joining Terac at one of the earliest stages and will have the opportunity to shape and grow with the company as a founding member.