Open Source Software Engineer

Who We Are

Our mission is to make the world programmable. Sight is one of the key ways we understand the world, and soon this will be true for the software we use, too. 

At Roboflow, we’re building the tools, community, and resources needed to make the world programmable with artificial intelligence. Roboflow simplifies building and using computer vision models. Today, over 500,000 developers, including those from half the Fortune 100, use Roboflow’s machine learning open source and hosted tools. That includes counting cells to accelerate cancer research, improving construction site safety, digitizing floor plans, preserving coral reef populations, guiding drone flight, and much more. 

Our team is small relative to our impact, and we believe our user success is our success (not the inverse). A team member summarized: “Roboflow is a company full of giant brains and tiny egos.” We find software has a multiplier effect on all roles (not only product and engineering), so Roboflow employs developers across the company in design, sales, customer support, marketing, and beyond. 

We’re supported by great customers and investors, having raised over \(60 million (check out our <a target=_blank rel=noopener noreferrer nofollow href=https://blog.roboflow.com/series-b/>Series B announcement here</a>!) from Google Ventures (GV), Craft Ventures, Y Combinator, Sam Altman, Lachy Groom, amongst other leading software investors.&nbsp;</p><h2><strong>What Were Looking For</strong></h2><p>We’re looking for people that can own a large set of problems and are motivated by the question: “How can I improve this?” Many members of our team are former founders and they love working at Roboflow because they get to work autonomously and build solutions from the ground up (but you dont 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.</p><h2><strong>What Youll Do</strong></h2><p>Expand our thriving open-source ecosystem and create a future where computer vision is accessible to every developer. Youll be building upon a foundation of 40k+ GitHub stars across our projects, with over 1 million monthly PIP downloads, 500k+ datasets, and 100k+ pre-trained models.&nbsp;</p><p>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 (<a target=_blank rel=noopener noreferrer nofollow href=https://github.com/roboflow/supervision><u>Supervision</u></a>, <a target=_blank rel=noopener noreferrer nofollow href=https://github.com/roboflow/inference><u>Inference</u></a>, <a target=_blank rel=noopener noreferrer nofollow href=https://github.com/roboflow/notebooks><u>Notebooks</u></a>, <a target=_blank rel=noopener noreferrer nofollow href=https://github.com/roboflow/multimodal-maestro><u>Maestro</u></a>, <a target=_blank rel=noopener noreferrer nofollow href=https://github.com/autodistill/autodistill><u>Autodistill</u></a>), and creating new projects that do not yet exist. You’ll help shape project roadmaps based on your own experiences, write code, create documentation, promote projects, develop content, talk to contributors, work with users, and keep a pulse on what’s missing in our ecosystem.&nbsp;</p><p><strong>Example Projects</strong></p><ul><li><p>Develop open source tools and integrations to help make computer vision easier for software developers.</p></li><li><p>Add features, fix bugs, and optimize code in our open source projects.</p></li><li><p>Review contributors’ pull requests.</p></li><li><p>Write documentation to make our software more accessible and understandable.</p></li><li><p>Experiment with new and emerging technologies, languages, models, frameworks, to find new ways to help developers succeed with computer vision.</p></li><li><p>Create demos and technical content all the way through production, publishing, and promotion.</p></li><li><p>Work with Product and Engineering in support of ensuring open source projects can be used within the core Roboflow product.</p></li><li><p>Ship enhancements and new features directly into the core platform based on your experience.</p></li><li><p>Build projects that will help improve the “bleeding edge” of the main Roboflow product.</p></li><li><p>Be an active participant in communities like HN, relevant subreddits, Discord groups, GitHub Issues, Stack Overflow, etc.</p></li><li><p>Promote our open-source projects through compelling blog posts, social media content, and other channels.</p></li></ul><h2><strong>Who You Are</strong></h2><p>You believe in the power of open source as a strategy to build a category-defining company. You have built and led 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.&nbsp;</p><ul><li><p><strong>Must-Have Technical Knowledge: </strong>Git, Python, PyTorch, Docker, OpenCV, NumPy, GitHub Actions, PyPI, Linux</p></li><li><p><strong>Nice to Have Technical Knowledge: </strong>JavaScript, OpenVINO, TensorRT, TFjs, TensorFlow, ONNX, CUDA&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Experience building open-source projects. You thrive at identifying key features and bringing them to fruition. You work well in public &amp; alongside internal and external contributors.</p></li><li><p>An excellent track record of shipping software projects with fast adoption and virality, either as part of a previous job or on your own.</p></li><li><p>An enthusiastic, strong, technical generalist.</p></li><li><p>A background in computer science or a related field.</p></li><li><p>Writing clean code in Python and JavaScript.</p></li><li><p>A profound interest in learning and understanding computer vision, machine learning, and developer tooling.</p></li><li><p>Skilled communicator and collaborator who wants to lead projects across both Marketing and Product teams eventually.</p></li><li><p>Experience planning development roadmaps and estimating tasks for software projects.</p></li><li><p>A history of creating and sharing technical content, such as blog posts and social media updates.</p></li><li><p>Having built with Roboflow is a huge plus! (We’ve hired a couple of Roboflow users now with great results).</p></li></ul><p><br></p><p><strong>📅 Within one month, you will…</strong></p><p>Spend the first week of onboarding in person with your manager (youll come to our NY or SF Hub!)</p><p>Start building a trusting relationship with your peers, and learning the company structure.</p><p>Ship at least one substantial new feature to an end user within your first week.</p><p>Submit many PRs across several of our open-source repos.</p><p>Build your first Roboflow computer vision product (if you havent already).</p><p>Understand the overall company vision, mission, strategy, product, roadmap, and open source’s critical contribution to the success of the company.</p><p>Create and share your first social media post highlighting one of our open-source projects.</p><p><strong>📅 Within three months, you will…</strong></p><p>Be fully confident in contributing to and maintaining at least two of our open-source projects.</p><p>Continue to ramp up your shipping velocity and impact.</p><p>Review PRs, contributing to projects, and helping community members.</p><p>Delivering new ideas and features to help increase the growth rate of open source projects.</p><p><strong>📅 Within six months, you will…</strong></p><p>Attend your first all-<a target=_blank rel=noopener noreferrer nofollow href=https://blog.roboflow.com/remote-company-onsite-ideas/>company onsite</a>.</p><p>Be fully confident in contributing to and helping maintain all of our open source projects.</p><p>Have a consistent cadence of open source strategy/planning, roadmapping, delivering new releases, and expanding functionality of projects.</p><p>Be ramped up on all relevant parts of the Roboflow product.</p><p><strong>Who Youll Be Working With</strong></p><p>You will be working directly with our Open Source Lead, along with our Marketing Lead, Marketing Engineers, and Core Product Engineers.</p><p>We are currently a team of 60 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, youll have the ability to work cross-functionally with many members of the team and solve a wide array of problems.</p><p><strong>Where Youll Work</strong></p><p>Roboflow is distributed across the US and Europe. We currently have Hubs in New York City and San Francisco with a penchant to open more as we grow. We provide opportunities (like team on-sites in different cities) and resources (like a travel stipend) to work in person with other team members as much as youd 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!</p><p><strong>When Youll Work</strong></p><p>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.&nbsp;</p><p><strong>Level</strong></p><p>Senior+</p><p><strong>What Youll Receive</strong></p><p>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.</p><p>💰 The target compensation for this role is \)175,000 to \(190,000 base salary</p><p>📈 In addition to our cash compensation, we offer generous perks and benefits. Below are some of the highlights:</p><ul><li><p>\)2500/yr Travel Stipend to travel anywhere anytime to work alongside other Roboflowers.

Interview Process (~12 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 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 for introduction, Piotr Skalski, to assess for overall mindset and skill set

This first interview is a time to get to know more about the role, allow us to get to know you better, and ensure it’s a good fit for both parties to continue moving forward in the process

Technical Assessment:

[6 hours] You will be asked to complete a technical task that either contributes to one of our open-source projects or builds upon one.

Department Lead Interview:

[45m] Meet with our Marketing Lead, Trevor Lynn

Content Assessment:

[3 hours] You’ll be given an assignment to showcase your content creation skill set. This will be a timed exercise, you choose the day and start time.

[45m] Meet with the hiring manager to review your content assessment.

Final Interviews:

[60m] Meet with our CTO, Brad Dwyer

[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.

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 blogs.

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.