Founding Engineer, Open Source

Salary range $225k $300k Equity 0.15-0.25% In-person NYC

Datalab trains models that read documents reliably at scale. The worlds most important information is trapped in PDFs scans and files that cant easily be parsed and getting it out correctly matters. From frontier AI labs processing training data to Fortune 500s like Siemens extracting decades of engineering records Datalab is where businesses turn to when extraction has to be right.

Were at an 8-figure run rate with a team of 7. Anthropic is a customer. And we have hundreds more across FAANG frontier AI labs healthcare finance government and legal. Our tools chandra surya marker and lift have 70000 GitHub stars and broad developer mindshare. Were backed by founding members of OpenAI FAIR and Hugging Face.

Were looking for a Founding Engineer to develop and evangelize our open source repos. This includes chandra surya marker pdftext and lift which collectively have over 70k Github stars. It also includes new tools we have yet to build and launch.

As you work on our repos youll also become the credible person to evangelize them. Youll turn your own work into demos benchmarks tutorials and launches. Youll also support other launches across Datalab especially when they touch open source components like the SDK.

Our projects have real reach: 70k GitHub stars and users everywhere from frontier AI labs to Fortune 500s. Your job is to turn that reach into a thriving engaged developer community through content code and showing up where developers already are.

If youre the kind of engineer whos energized by both building things and helping other people build this is the role for you.

Day to day:

Own our open source repos and SDK: Drive chandra surya marker lift and our Python SDK forward as a hands-on contributor. Ship new features and improvements that the market cares about help plan new versions and own open-source launches end-to-end. This spans from the release itself to the demos benchmarks and content to evangelize the launch.

Build demos and benchmarks. Build example apps templates and starter projects on top of Datalabs models and API that make it obvious whats possible and easy to remix. Publish benchmarks and evals that show in code how our models compare.

Turn your work into content that teaches: Write technical blogs guides tutorials and changelogs that help developers get started with marker surya chandra lift and our API then go deep. Establish cookbooks and quickstart guides where we dont have them yet. Write content that helps developers differentiate between our platform / our models and our competitors (e.g. how to run evals).

Close the loop with product: Bring developer feedback friction points and emerging needs back to engineering and product to help shape what we build next.

Grow the community: Engage developers on GitHub Discord X Reddit and beyond. Celebrate contributors answer questions highlight cool projects and add value in conversations rather than just promote. Be a visible trusted voice for the platform online.

Youre a strong engineer whos shipped things developers use and you also love helping other people build. You know how to explain a complex idea simply and youre as comfortable writing a tutorial or recording a demo as you are building a feature.

• 5 years building production software with meaningful open-source contributions

• Strong hands-on engineering skills; fluent in Python shipping real reproducible well-tested code

• Track record of owning code end-to-end - design implementation release and maintenance

• Able to create credible technical content - blogs docs tutorials demos or video - that developers actually read watch and use because you understand the system deeply

• Comfortable representing your work publicly whether in writing on camera or in online communities

• Comfortable with an early-stage startup - self-directed hands-on and happy to balance depth with shipping velocity

Bonus points if you:

• Have experience with OCR document AI or structured extraction

• Have contributed to or maintained a widely-used open-source ML/vision/NLP project

• Have a growing audience on YouTube X or Twitch or an active presence in developer communities

• Have used (and loved) marker surya chandra or lift

1. 30-minute video call to evaluate fit

2. 1.5-hour in person meeting to build an architecture together

3. Async code sharing review phase (not a take-home project you just share some code samples)

4. Culture fit interviews with the team

At this stage of the company every interview is somewhat custom so these phases may be rearranged slightly.

Datalab is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of any characteristic protected by federal state or local law.

If you need an accommodation to participate in our hiring process or if you believe you have experienced discrimination or harassment at any point in it contact

Required Experience:

IC