Who Gets Hired and Onto Which Teams
Terranova builds autonomous robots that inject wood slurry deep underground to lift sinking cities. The mission is specific — subsurface terraforming for flood-prone urban terrain, and that specificity shapes every hire.
This guide maps Terranova's hiring mix, compensation bands, interview process, physical work sites, and the qualities that predict tenure, drawn from live postings, aggregator data, and employee reviews.
As of August 2026 the company sits at Seed stage, 11–50 people, with Fast AI Jobs reporting $7 million raised in a single November 2025 round. The headcount is small enough that every role still carries disproportionate weight, but large enough that functional teams have formed. The live board shows 15 open positions clustered in five categories: Hardware & Physical Engineering (4), Customer Success & Solutions (1), Infrastructure & Security (1), Sales & Partnerships (1), and Software Engineering (1). That leaves seven roles unclassified in the public breakdown.
The posting history tells a clearer story. Since mid-2025 Terranova has advertised for a Robotics Controls Engineer, Senior Electrical Engineer, and Embedded Systems Engineer, all seven months ago, followed by a Director of Business Development ten months out. More recent posts (one to two months old) add a VP of Ops, a Forward Deployed Operator, a "Drop Out Engineer," a Government Programs & Proposal Lead, a Shop Apprentice, a Mechanical/Test Engineering Intern, a Software Engineering Intern, and a Mechanical Engineer. The cadence accelerates toward hardware and field operations: three mechanical roles, two interns on the test floor, an apprentice in the shop, and an operator meant to deploy with the robots.
Every recent listing on the Zero G Talent board places the role in Berkeley. The concentration is not coincidental; the hardware loop (design, machine, test, iterate) demands physical colocation.
The team distribution reflects a company still proving its core loop. Hardware dominates open roles. Software is lean, one listed opening, though the controls and embedded hires blur that line. Business development and government programs exist because the customer is municipal, not consumer. Customer success appears once, sized for early deployments rather than scale. No dedicated recruiting, HR, or finance roles appear; those functions are likely fractional or founder-managed.
What It Pays
Terranova's compensation structure comes into focus through the company's own live postings on this board, which show a salaried band running roughly $47k–$111k with a $73k median across six roles, plus a cluster of hourly internships and apprenticeships all based in Berkeley. The widest posted range belongs to the Director of Business Development at Zero G Talent board's figures of $90k–$150k/year, while the technical intern cohort — Controls/Robotics, Embedded Systems, Mechanical/Test Engineering, sits at $25–35/hr. A Shop Apprentice lists $25–30/hr and a Software Engineering Intern $20–28/hr. These figures are current as of the board's latest refresh and represent the only first-party, role-specific data available for this entity.
| Role | Type | Posted Range | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Director of Business Development | Salaried | $90,000–$150,000/yr | Berkeley |
| Controls/Robotics Intern | Hourly | $25–35/hr | Berkeley |
| Embedded Systems Intern | Hourly | $25–35/hr | Berkeley |
| Mechanical/Test Engineering Intern | Hourly | $25–35/hr | Berkeley |
| Shop Apprentice | Hourly | $25–30/hr | Berkeley |
| Software Engineering Intern | Hourly | $20–28/hr | Berkeley |
Third-party aggregators paint a different picture, though the entity names blur. Glassdoor reported a Terranova IT Manager average at $124,796, and Glassdoor's data shows a Staff Software Engineer estimated total pay of $184k–$269k/year, both well above the board's salaried ceiling. Salary.com shows Terra Nova Industries (note the space) at $68,887–$89,265 and TerraNova Capital Partners Inc at $93,111–$120,293. Neither Salary.com entity matches the Berkeley robotics profile on this board; the Glassdoor figures could reflect the same company at different seniority levels or a different Terranova entirely. Treat the board numbers as the floor for what this hiring team has actually budgeted and posted.
Equity practices are not disclosed in any of the sourced postings or reports. Benefits data is similarly thin. Separately, Terra Nova Development (a Suncor-operated offshore asset in Canada-Newfoundland) publishes annual benefits reports covering employment, training, diversity, and community investment, but that is a distinct oil-and-gas operation, not the Berkeley robotics employer. No first-party benefits summary for this Terranova appears in the research.
How the Hiring Process Works and What Gets Candidates Through It
Terranova's hiring process timeline is not publicly documented in detail. Glassdoor data from seven interview reports for Terranova Italy (a separate entity) shows an average of 45 days from application to decision. For the Berkeley operation, candidates should expect a recruiter screen followed by technical and behavioral rounds appropriate to the role. The Zero G Talent board lists intern hourly bands ($20–35) and the Director's $90k–$150k range, reflecting qualification-first screening at different experience levels.
Offers come verbally first, followed by pre-employment checks where applicable. Negotiation covers more than base salary: PTO accrual and starting balance, 401(k) matching, start date, and remote/hybrid/on-site arrangement are all on the table.
What advances a candidate? Meeting every minimum qualification, demonstrating preferred qualifications with concrete evidence, and showing technical fluency matched to the role's actual work. The process rewards specificity over breadth at every stage. That specificity plays out daily in a Berkeley shop where the hardware loop runs.
Where the Work Happens
Terranova's physical footprint splits across three distinct operations that share a name but not a mission. The roles on Zero G Talent's board — six salaried positions and a cluster of internships, all listed in Berkeley, California, belong to the robotic terraforming venture operating at terranova.inc. That company "uses robots to inject wood slurry deep underground, precisely lifting properties out of flood zones with no surface disturbance," and its Berkeley site is where those robotic systems are cut, fabricated, tested, and assembled. A LinkedIn posting for the Shop Apprentice role confirms the on-site expectation: "You'll help build our robotic systems: cutting, fabricating, testing, and assembling full systems." The Director of Business Development post sits in the same location, alongside internships in those same technical tracks, plus software engineering, all Berkeley-based, all tied to the same hardware pipeline.
The Italian side of the Terranova group, documented at terranova-instruments.com, carries the historical weight. It "gather[s] the oldest and most historical Italian Brands of Process Instrumentation: Spriano® (1923), Valcom® (1974) and Mec-Rela® (1976)." Its Operative Office sits at Via Gramsci 1, 26827 Terranova dei Passerini (LO), Italy, and its Head Office at Via Rosso Medardo 16, 20159 Milano, Italy. A lab there runs lithium inverter cell validation; YouTube posts from July and August 2026 show quality testing procedures and an upgrade to 96-cell capacity. That facility serves process instrumentation for industrial and automotive markets, not the terraforming robotics. The research does not show any board-listed roles in Italy.
A third entity, TerraNova Solutions (terranovasol.com), describes itself as providing "integration and support solutions benefit[ting] mission-critical assets of National Defence and emergency services", repair, design, engineering, test, assembly, warehousing, and management. No hiring data links it to the Berkeley postings. The offshore oil-and-gas "Terra Nova" FPSO, the New Zealand care-home litigation, the high-school yearbook program, and the consulting firm Terra Nova Consulting are all separate entities. They share a name; they do not share a payroll. Conflating them in an interview signals poor due diligence.
For a candidate evaluating the Berkeley site, the daily environment is a robotics integration shop: mechanical fabrication, electrical assembly, controls tuning, and field-deployable system validation. The work is physical and iterative — the Shop Apprentice description makes that explicit. The Controls/Robotics and Embedded Systems interns will touch the same hardware loop. The Mechanical/Test Engineering intern role implies a test cell or bench infrastructure capable of stressing subsystems before field deployment. Software Engineering interns write code that runs on the machines injecting slurry underground. The Director of Business Development operates from the same address but faces outward: the terranova.inc site emphasizes "land elevation, flood adaptation, wetland restoration, and development projects" and notes that "elevated sites are ready to build immediately because full consolidation happens in hours not years."
No research source specifies square footage, tooling lists, or shift structures for the Berkeley facility. The Italian lab's lithium-cell test rig is the only instrumented capability shown on video. The defense-focused TerraNova Solutions operation lists no location in the research. Candidates should treat the Berkeley site as the sole hiring location reflected in current board data and plan for on-site, hardware-adjacent work.
Who Thrives Here
The Terranova that appears on that board is a Berkeley-based operation hiring across robotics, embedded systems, mechanical test, software, and shop-floor apprenticeship roles. Its own postings sketch a team that spans commercial growth, controls, firmware, hardware validation, and hands-on fabrication. The board's aggregated salary band runs that same range across six salaried roles.
Glassdoor hosts 14 reviews on the U.S. site and four on the Irish portal, all anonymous. The volume is modest but consistent with a company of this scale.
The internship slate is revealing. Controls/robotics, embedded systems, mechanical/test, and software interns all sit in the same $25–$35/hr band. The shop apprentice role at $25–$30/hr sits beside them, not below. That parity signals a culture where writing firmware, tuning a PID loop, designing a test jig, and machining a bracket are treated as adjacent crafts rather than a hierarchy.
The Director of Business Development role at $90k–$150k is the only senior commercial posting.
What the research does not show — and no public source reliably captures, is a codified competency framework or a published set of core values tied to promotion criteria. The board data, the postings, and the review count form the only verifiable picture.
The robots that inject wood slurry beneath sinking cities don't build themselves. They're built by the intersection the company hires for — firmware to fixture, controls to customer, and the next hire will either deepen that intersection or fracture it.
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