Chief Operating Officer

About Terranova

Terranova is a venture-backed deep-tech company building intelligent robotic systems designed to reshape land and protect the built environment. Its technology is focused on lifting terrain, restoring wetlands, and safeguarding essential infrastructure from flooding. The company’s mission spans climate resilience, disaster recovery, housing development, and defense use cases across the U.S. and beyond.

The team is looking for people who want to work on a concrete, physical problem at civilization scale. This is a chance to contribute to work that has the potential to visibly change the world.

Role Overview

Terranova is hiring a COO or VP Operations who can act as a full-company operator. The role owns execution across engineering, field work, manufacturing, recruiting, finance, customer delivery, and internal systems. The person in this seat will set the pace, keep the organization tightly coordinated, and ensure that the many moving parts behind each project are actually delivered.

This is a cofounder-level position in a very early-stage company. It offers significant equity and broad ownership, along with the opportunity to help shape a major hard-tech company from an early point. The environment is intense, fast, and uncertain, and leadership is expected to be earned through performance and judgment.

Responsibilities

• Take ownership of execution across engineering, operations, deployments, hiring, finance, procurement, legal coordination, and customer delivery.
• Design and maintain the company’s operating rhythm, including weekly planning, project tracking, dashboards, accountability mechanisms, and decision processes.
• Lead and energize a high-intensity technical team while building trust with engineers, field operators, and the founders.
• Oversee field deployments from planning through completion, removing blockers related to logistics, staffing, materials, permitting, vendors, and customer coordination.
• Partner closely with the CEO on fundraising support, board updates, strategic planning, and top company priorities.
• Support go-to-market and customer execution with private equity firms, developers, infrastructure owners, government agencies, USACE, and defense-adjacent customers.
• Help recruit, assess, and close exceptional candidates across technical, operational, and commercial functions.
• Operate comfortably in an early-stage startup environment with long days, six-day workweeks, and field hours when required.

Requirements

• Strong operational judgment, high ownership, and the ability to move with intensity.
• Background leading strategy, operations, deployment, product, or company-building functions in a high-growth deep-tech, robotics, aerospace, defense, infrastructure, or hardware startup.
• Confidence managing technical teams and making sound decisions on complex engineering and field-operations issues, even without being the deepest specialist in the room.
• Comfort working with customers, investors, board members, vendors, and government or defense stakeholders.
• Willingness to work from the Berkeley, California office.
• U.S. work authorization is required; visa sponsorship, including H-1B, is not available.

Preferred Background

• Experience as a VP, Director, or Head of Strategy or Operations at a leading deep-tech company.
• Prior COO, CPO, CTO, VP Ops, or GM experience at a Series B or later hardware company with a strong public presence.
• Exposure to companies such as SpaceX, Anduril, Astranis, Armada, Zipline, Tesla, or similar high-pressure robotics and hard-tech environments.
• Experience selling or deploying products that are difficult both to build and to sell.
• Background in military, defense, infrastructure, disaster recovery, government, or field-deployment GTM work.
• Founder or founder-level operating experience, including having lived through an early 0-to-1 phase.
• Solid fluency in finance, strategic planning, and fundraising.

Ideal Candidate Profile

• An unusually capable operator who is roughly 3 to 15 years into their career and has advanced quickly.
• Someone who could realistically start a company, but prefers joining Terranova’s mission instead.
• Experience building or running something real in robotics, aerospace, defense, infrastructure, construction tech, or complex hardware.
• Someone who can bring order to a messy early-stage environment, raise the standard, and increase team intensity and effectiveness.
• A person with enough technical judgment to lead engineers, enough commercial sense to support selling, and enough operational force to keep the organization moving.
• Experience from a flagship deep-tech company, an Elon-founded company, or another serious venture-backed hardware business is especially valued.

Additional Information

This is an on-site role based in Berkeley, CA. The company is specifically looking for an operator who can lead under pressure, make decisions quickly, and help build one of the defining hard-tech companies of the next decade.