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:

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

What work our customers need completed and what success requires

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. We've raised $16M from SignalFire, Emergence, Audacious, and SV Angel, and we work with leading AI labs and research companies.

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 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. This role owns the economics behind all of the above: pricing, pay rates, margins, and cash. 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 contributor payout engine that pays thousands of experts every month across many countries and payment rails.

Build planning and forecasting: budgets, burn, hiring plans, and the operating model, plus project-level margin analysis and pricing support for deals.

Support fundraising and the board: investor updates, data rooms, and diligence for future rounds.

Build the systems: choose and implement tooling (ERP, spend management, payroll, billing) and the 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 or accounting, ideally a mix of Big 4, banking, or consulting 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

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

Misc

Compensation: Competitive salary, meaningful equity vested over four years, $10K relocation bonus (for moving to the Bay Area), and an additional $5k housing bonus (if you move within 0.5 miles of our office), Health, Dental, Vision insurance, 401(k) with company match

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