Roboflow

🖼️ Give your software the sense of sight.

Open Source Software Engineer

$135K - $165K
Location
San Francisco, CA, US / New York, NY, US / Remote (US)
Job Type
Full-time
Experience
3+ years
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About the role

Who We Are

Roboflow is a venture-backed SaaS startup that empowers innovators all over the world to build, train, and deploy computer vision models. Roboflow believes that computer vision is a foundation technology that will transform nearly every industry. We currently have over 250,000 users, including half of the Fortune 100. Roboflow has enabled our customers to accelerate cancer research, conduct experiments in space, accelerate the world’s transition to green energy, and improve the retail experience (to name a few!) with world-altering technology. Investors like Y Combinator, David Sack’s Craft Ventures, Lachy Groom, the founders of OpenAI (Sam Altman and Greg Brockman), and many others back Roboflow.

As with any rapidly scaling startup, we hope to build a team that is both versatile and adaptable. Each role has tremendous potential for growth. As such, we believe that coachability, enthusiasm, and an entrepreneurial mindset are more important than experience or qualifications.

Our goal is to build a magnetic environment for exceptional talent.

What We're Looking For

We’re looking for people that can own a large set of problems and are motivated by the question, “How can I improve this?” Over 80% of our current team is a former founder and they love working at Roboflow because they get to work autonomously and build solutions from the ground up (but you don't have to be a former founder to thrive at Roboflow!). Roboflow is still in its early stage and each department runs a startup within itself that defines a problem, works with our customers, builds ideal solutions, and adapts quickly to changes.

What You'll Do

Building our open source projects. You’ll be starting from a base of 10k+ stars, 475k monthly PIP downloads, 200k+ datasets, and 50k pre-trained models and building towards a world where every developer uses computer vision.

As an early hire both from a company and open source organization perspective, you’ll have a significant impact on the product and the direction of Open Source at Roboflow. Your focus will be on adding value to the AI/ML/CV open source ecosystem, working with existing Roboflow projects (Autodistill, Supervision, Inference, Notebooks, Maestro), and creating new projects that do not yet exist. You’ll help shape project roadmaps based on your own experiences, write code, create documentation, talk to contributors, work with users, and keep a pulse on what’s missing in our ecosystem.

Example Projects

  • Develop open source tools and integrations to help make computer vision easier for software developers.
  • Add features, fix bugs, and optimize code in our open source projects.
  • Review contributors’ pull requests.
  • Write documentation to make our software more accessible and understandable.
  • Experiment with new and emerging technologies, languages, models, frameworks, to find new ways to help developers succeed with computer vision.
  • Create demos and technical content all the way through production and publishing.
  • Work with Product and Engineering in support of ensuring open source projects can be used within the core Roboflow product.
  • Ship enhancements and new features directly into the core platform based on your experience.
  • Build projects that will help improve the “bleeding edge” of the main Roboflow product.
  • Be an active participant in communities like HN, relevant subreddits, Discord groups, GitHub Issues, Stack Overflow, etc.

Who You Are

You believe in the power of open source as a strategy to build a category defining company. You have open source projects of your own, contribute to projects on a regular basis, and have a passion for making computer vision more accessible with open source software. We anticipate the role being focused 50% on core contribution, 30% on communication/promotion, and 20% on other areas.

  • Must Have Technical Knowledge: Git, Python, PyTorch, Docker, OpenCV, NumPy
  • Nice to Have Technical Knowledge: JavaScript, OpenVINO, TensorRT, TFjs, TensorFlow, ONNX, CUDA, GitHub Actions, Linux
  • Experience building open source projects. You thrive at identifying key features and bringing them to fruition. You work well in public & alongside internal and external contributors.
  • An excellent track record of shipping software projects with fast adoption and virality, either as part of a previous job or on your own.
  • An enthusiastic, strong, technical generalist.
  • A background in computer science or a related field.
  • Writing clean code in Python and JavaScript.
  • A profound interest to learn and understand computer vision, machine learning, and developer tooling.
  • Skilled communicator and collaborator that wants to eventually lead projects across both Marketing and Product teams.
  • Having built with Roboflow is a huge plus! (We’ve hired a couple Roboflow users now with great results).

Who You'll Be Working With

You will directly be working with our Marketing Lead, our team of Marketing Engineers, and Core Product Engineers.

We are currently a team of 40 team members located all over the US and Europe. Our team’s backgrounds range from high school whiz kids, former founders of technology companies and fashion lines, world-class engineers, CMOs to CEOs, and have experience scaling businesses to millions in revenue. We want to work with exceptional people with a diverse background. At this early stage, you'll have the ability to work cross-functionally with many members of the team and solve a wide array of problems.

Where You'll Work

Roboflow is distributed across the US and Europe. We currently have Hubs in New York City and San Francisco with a penchant to opening more as we grow. We provide opportunities (like team onsites in different cities) and resources (like a travel stipend) to work in person with other team members as much as you'd like, while also supporting remote team members. You can work from one of our Hubs, work from home, work at co-working spaces, etc. We want you to work where you work best!

When You'll Work

Given that we are a remote company and can hire almost anywhere in the world, we don’t have a particular time-zone preference for this role. However, you may need to be available for non-recurring urgent meetings outside of working hours. We have a flexible schedule that allows you to work collaboratively with other team members and asynchronously when needed.

Level

Senior+

What You'll Receive

To determine your salary, we use a number of market and data-driven salary sources. We review all salaries every 6 months to ensure we stay in line with the market.

💰 The target compensation for this role is $165,000 base salary.

📈 In addition to our cash compensation, we offer generous perks and benefits. Below are some of the highlights:

  • A $2500 Travel Stipend to travel anywhere anytime to work with alongside other Roboflowers.
  • A $350 Productivity stipend to spend on things that make your work environment more productive, like high - speed internet at home or a co-working space.
  • Coverage of up to 100% of your health insurance costs for you and your partner or family.
  • Equity in the company so we are all invested in the future of computer vision and Roboflow.

First 90 days overview

📅 Within one month, you will…

  • Spend the first week onboarding in person with your manager (you'll come to our NY or SF Hub!)
  • Start building a trusting relationship with your peers, and learning the company structure.
  • Ship at least one substantial new feature to an end user within your first week.
  • Submit many PRs across several of our open source repos.
  • Build your first Roboflow computer vision product (if you haven't already).
  • Understand the overall company vision, mission, strategy, product, roadmap, and open source’s critical contribution to the success of the company.

📅 Within three months, you will…

  • Be fully confident in contributing to and maintaining at least two of our open source projects.
  • Continue to ramp up your shipping velocity and impact.
  • Review PRs, contributing to projects, and helping community members.
  • Delivering new ideas and features to help increase the growth rate of open source projects.

📅 Within six months, you will…

  • Attend your first all-company onsite.
  • Be fully confident in contributing to and helping maintain all of our open source projects.
  • Have a consistent cadence of open source strategy/planning, roadmapping, delivering new releases, and expanding functionality of projects.
  • Be ramped up on all relevant parts of the Roboflow product.

Not sure if this is you?

We want a diverse, global team, with a broad range of experience and perspectives. If this job sounds great, but you’re not sure if you qualify, apply to our Former Founders role or subscribe to our career newsletter by emailing "Subscribe" to operations @ roboflow.com. We carefully consider every application, and will either move forward with you, find another team that might be a better fit, keep in touch for future opportunities, or thank you for your time.

Learn More About Us

We are building a diverse Satellite team that is distributed across the globe. Roboflow is an equal opportunity workplace; we welcome people from all backgrounds, communities, and experiences.

We provide competitive compensation and stellar benefits to accelerate your personal and work life.

Learn more about what it is like to work at Roboflow by reading our blog.

We want to ensure Roboflow is an environment that suits your working style and empowers you to do your best work.

  • See our careers page for all open listings.

About the interview

Interview Process (~6 hours)

Below is the interview process you can expect for this role. We are all motivated to work with an exceptional team and don't currently have recruiters at Roboflow. You will be speaking directly with our team about what it's like to work and thrive at here. We like to work fast at Roboflow, so don't be surprised if all the below conversations happen over a day or two.

Introduction Phase:

[45m] Meet with hiring manager, Trevor Lynn, Marketing Lead, for an introduction to assess overall mind and skill set.

  • This first interview is a time for us to understand what you’re interested in doing in your next role and ensure it's a good fit for both parties to continue moving forward in the process

[45m] Technical Assessment, if applicable.

Team Interview Phase:

[60m] Meet with our Computer Vision Engineer, Piotr Skalski

[60m] Meet with our Technical Marketer, James Gallagher

[60m] Meet with our CTO, Brad Dwyer

Use this time to review specifics about the job description Begin working through your 30/60/90 projects Ask questions!

Final Interview Stage:

[30m] Meet with Kate Wagner, Head of Operations for a culture discussion

[60m] Meet with Joseph Nelson, CEO

We check references and conduct a background check.

Note: you are welcome to request additional conversations with anyone you would like to meet and we will accommodate as best we can.

Note: you are welcome to request additional conversations with anyone you would like to meet and we will accommodate as best we can.

About Roboflow

We're on a mission to remove barriers that prevent developers from building their own computer vision applications. Roboflow streamlines the process of labeling, training, and deploying a computer vision model.

Why

Computer vision is going to transform every industry. We're already seeing this play out in fields like transportation (self driving cars), agriculture (drone spraying), and medicine (early stage cancer detection). But these superpowers shouldn't be locked up in the handful of giant technology companies that can afford to hire teams of machine learning PhDs.

What

Roboflow enables any developer to use computer vision without being a machine learning expert. Our product is the key missing infrastructure that allows developers turn raw images into a useful model -- replacing a sprawling list of one-off utils everyone previously had to reinvent and enabling our users to have working models in hours, not weeks.

For example, Sarah Hinkley from Barn Owl Drones uses vision to identify weeds from crops in drone images so her customers can use fewer herbicides and grow more. She's one of our over 50,000 users working on problems we couldn't even imagine when we got started!

Who

Roboflow is a venture-backed SaaS startup that empowers innovators all over the world to build, train, and deploy computer vision models. Roboflow believes that computer vision is a foundation technology that will transform nearly every industry. We currently have over 250,000 users, including half of the Fortune 100. Roboflow has enabled our customers to accelerate cancer research, conduct experiments in space, accelerate the world’s transition to green energy, and improve the retail experience (to name a few!) with world-altering technology. Investors like Y Combinator, David Sack’s Craft Ventures, Lachy Groom, the founders of OpenAI (Sam Altman and Greg Brockman), and many others back Roboflow.

As with any rapidly scaling startup, we hope to build a team that is both versatile and adaptable. Each role has tremendous potential for growth. As such, we believe that coachability, enthusiasm, and an entrepreneurial mindset are more important than experience or qualifications.

Growth

Roboflow went from zero to over 20,000 users in 2020 (and now to over 50,000 in 2021) and our customers are requesting features and product enhancements faster than we can provide them.

We're starting to build out our engineering, marketing, and sales teams. As an integral part of our core team, all roles will inevitably involve wearing a lot of hats; we're specifically looking for people excited about learning new things and filling gaps where needed. And most importantly, we're looking for people who ship.

Resources

Check out our Careers page for more info on the company, how we work together, and how we're building strong culture and camaraderie in a post-COVID world.

Roboflow
Founded:2019
Team Size:35
Location:Des Moines, IA
Founders
Brad Dwyer
Brad Dwyer
Founder
Joseph Nelson
Joseph Nelson
Founder