Founding teran

Bay Area, on-site, full-time. Requires US work authorisation.

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It's Tuesday, 9 AM. You badge into the lab, drop your bag at the bench and check the reactor that’s been running overnight. 

The conversion is up. By a lot. The alphafold insights and reactor hardware tweaks you made, the ones Pedro told you on Friday it would take a week to implement, you ran over the weekend. You have pushed the capability of the enzyme reactor past anything we’ve seen. You stare at the HPLC trace for a minute. You came in expecting something incremental. You got a step change.

By 10 AM you’ve messaged the team, pulled a fresh aliquot and started a stability assay with Pedro.

At 1 PM Amy tells you she’s just got off the phone with an LA beauty house and they want a 50 g sample for their head of R&D. She wants the sample by next week. You look at the reactor. You look at your bench. You tell her tomorrow. She raises an eyebrow. 

By 2 PM you’re working at the bench with Amy. The reactor is humming. By 5 PM you have the material, you’ve run the HPLC and pored over the datasheet. You finish the antioxidant assay, and it reads out at 10x the potency of anything on the market. Friday you ship 50 g with the trace, the conversion ratio, the stability numbers and the efficacy data their team can actually act on.

Monday morning, the customer says it’s the most impressed they’ve been with both the efficacy and speed of any supplier they’ve worked with. Amy forwards the email with one line: “this is because of you!” The deal closes. You’ve just shown what a vertically integrated enzymatic platform can do when the same team makes the biocatalyst, runs the reactor and proves the molecule works. You're already back at the bench, growing the cells for the second batch of enzyme for our second molecule, and starting to think about the third one.

The team eats dinner on the balcony whilst the sun sets. Pedro insists, again, that the enzyme field is focussing on perfecting individual benchmarks for different models, rather than building AI models that can understand the context of the reactor. Amy is scrolling through the Meta Ads comments on her phone. There were 2400 waitlist signups in three days - people tagging friends, asking when the first consumer product will be available and a few asking whether it actually works. She reads a few out. The pattern is clear. 

The people signing up didn’t trust the category, but they're responding to the brands that are grounded in science. Brands that name the molecule and show the study. Amy asks whether you’d let your mum use the prototype lip balm yet. You think about it honestly, the molecule is ready and the data is impressive, but you've been wearing the prototype for a week and the texture isn't there yet. You tell her. Her and Pedro nod, make note, and ask what you'd change. 

You leave the lab at 9 PM realising you’re making the most potent natural antioxidants anyone has ever produced, 20x the potency of vitamin C, using nature’s own chemistry in a modular reactor, in a fraction of the infrastructure, time and cost the industry thinks is possible, and turned it into a groundbreaking new product. You’re learning more quickly than you’ve learned anywhere else before.

Our Mission

Earth is on a path to destruction, because the companies that decide what humanity puts on its skin, in its mouths, in its animal companions, and into its natural environment, rely on chemistry from the 20th century. These companies quietly represent trillions of dollars of market cap between them, profiting from ingredients and chemical processes that humanity should have already resigned to history.

What if you could build a giant built for the 21st century, a fully-verticalised biomanufacturing platform that spins out innovative ingredients into world-leading products, all under one roof?

We are charting a path towards building the world’s first trillion-dollar biomanufacturing company by displacing these conglomerates. Companies with this scale of ambition come around once in a generation, and we want to find people as crazy as us to go beyond where any industrial biotechnology company has gone before. 

It will take late nights, weekends, many failed experiments, and setbacks around every corner. But bringing these ideas into reality would mean fundamentally changing the world, at tera scale.

tera is building small, modular enzyme reactors that produce chemicals for consumer products at a cost and quality the incumbents cannot match. We use AI-assisted enzyme screening, immobilisation and reactor designs that fit on a benchtop instead of filling an entire warehouse. We are starting with cosmetics and we want to break into food, fragrances, supplements, pet food, and all other consumer goods sectors.

We are starting with a Mediterranean plant derived antioxidant 20x more potent than vitamin C, made in a reactor that fits on a benchtop.

We're a lean founding team. Amy did her PhD at UCL, 3D printing degradable constructs and functionalising them with enzymes for sustained drug release. Pedro started his PhD at Imperial College London interfacing high-throughput data collection methods with active learning for enzyme engineering. He dropped out early to join and build with Amy. 

We raised $2.3M from LocalGlobe, Creator Fund, the Vice Chair of the German chemical giant Henkel, a former Director at Google DeepMind, Cory Levy at Z Fellows, Long Journey Ventures and more. In 6 months we have a working reactor that provides 10x antioxidant potency compared to what’s on the market, and several potential B2B customers waiting for samples to engage in partnerships. We made the Forbes 30 under 30 list in Europe. We relocated from London to San Francisco to test ourselves in the most competitive ecosystem in the world.

The Role

You'll be the founding teran. Employee number one. The first person in the lab who isn’t Pedro or Amy.

You’ll work shoulder-to-shoulder with Pedro and Amy on the science. That means enzyme biology and biocatalysis at the core, from screening engineered variants to immobilising them, characterising performance, and pushing the conversion, yield, and purity of large scale reactions in ways the academic literature hasn’t dared to. It also means working on reactors. If you have engineering instincts, 3D printing skills, or strong chemistry intuition you will use all of them. We are looking for a strong enzyme background, but we are not precious about disciplinary borders.

You’ll also be a generalist when we need one. Some weeks that might mean formulating the next prototype of our own cosmetic or supplement product. Some weeks it means running mammalian cell assays in the lab to measure the efficacy of our ingredients. What you actually do will shift as the company grows.

You will

• Help us engineer enzymes for novel reactions that help us make incredible new compounds for cosmetics, food, fragrance, and other consumer goods industries 
• Run enzyme reactors day-to-day towards scalable processes that reliably produces kilogram-scale material at customer-acceptable purity
• Help build the analytical backbone (HPLC methods, stability protocols, mammalian assays) that lets us promise customers data they can trust
• Execute product formulation to turn chemical compounds into fully fledged ingredients that can be adopted across consumer goods, whether that’s a B2B partner or our own D2C launch.

You won’t have done all of this before and you don’t need to have. Although enzyme engineering is a priority, everything else is learnable if you have the instincts and somewhere in your past have picked up something hard quickly.

What could make you a fit

• You have a degree in biochemistry, bioengineering, synthetic biology or similar - experience in working on engineering enzymes in cool labs is our top priority.
• You're also a generalist. You’re willing to learn whatever the week demands - how to formulate chemicals into different cosmetic formats one day, setting up mammalian cell assays the next, 3D printing or fixing the HPLC the day after, running the Meta ads dashboard the day after that.
• You've picked up a hard technical skill in weeks and can point to the time you did it
• You want to be in an environment where you're trusted with real work from day one, not running someone else's side project for a month, or waiting on outside approvals to contribute to novel product ideas
• Your last manager or PI would say you were one of the most talented scientists amongst your peers
• You actually care about what ends up in people’s bodies. You’d want to use the ingredients and products that we make and you have opinions about what great products could look like

If this is you, or you know someone, 1-min form here.