Senior Software Engineer
About the role
About Datalab
Datalab is an applied research lab in New York. We train our own models to turn documents into data you can verify: scans, dense tables, handwriting, the pages other tools quietly get wrong.
Because we own the models, a customer's hard problem becomes a roadmap conversation, not a feature request. Our open-source work (Marker, Surya, Chandra) has more than 75,000 GitHub stars. Customers include Anthropic, ElevenLabs, Gamma, Reflection AI, and Legora, along with insurers, financial firms, and healthcare companies. We deploy anywhere from our API to fully air-gapped on-prem.
We're a small, founder-led team. You'll have real influence on how we sell and what we build.
Role Overview
We’re looking for a fullstack engineer who wants to build the interfaces, tools, and infrastructure that help developers and enterprises use our models. You’ll work across the stack to shape how people interact with OCR, extraction, and document-understanding systems. That includes building core inference workflows, creating intuitive UI for complex parsing tasks, and improving the developer experience across our open-source repos and API.
This is a high-ownership role that blends engineering, product thinking, and community engagement. You will work closely with the founders and the rest of the team to ship features, improve performance, and make our technology accessible to a global community of builders.
As a small and fast-moving team, roles are fluid. You should enjoy working across backend, frontend, performance, and user-facing surfaces. Your work will directly influence how teams evaluate and deploy our models.
Day to day, you will:
Ship features to our open source repos, API, and internal tooling.
Design and build frontend features that make document parsing more interactive and understandable.
Optimize inference performance and improve the reliability of our frameworks.
Engage with the community on Github and Discord by collecting feedback, debugging issues, and identifying opportunities for improvement.
Support customer implementations with technical guidance and troubleshooting when needed.
Ideal Candidate
You thrive at the intersection of engineering, product, and user experience. You like working close to real users and making technical systems feel simple and intuitive. You operate with autonomy and ownership and enjoy moving quickly in an environment where you can directly influence outcomes.
We’re eager to work with someone who has:
5+ years of fullstack development experience building APIs and/or developer-focused products.
Experience building in early-stage startup environments.
Shipped and maintained production systems serving high-volume traffic.
Experience building with LLMs and agentic workflows.
Bonus points:
Experience with Python ML frameworks (PyTorch, Transformers, etc.) or interest in training models.
Familiarity with document processing, computer vision, or OCR systems.
Maintained or contributed to open-source projects with active communities
Experience writing technical content or demos to showcase your work.
Interview process
30-minute video call to evaluate fit
90-minute live architecture discussion
Culture fit interviews with the team
At this stage of the company, every interview is somewhat custom, so these phases may be rearranged slightly.
Equal opportunity
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 [email protected].