Founding Marketer

The posting, as Datalab wrote it

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

Marketing at Datalab already has real infrastructure. We run a combined launch and content calendar with a defined playbook - channels, owners, and cadence for every release - and we ship two to three launches a week against it. No one here works on marketing full-time, so nobody owns the bigger question of how we show up when a developer, a buyer, or an AI agent looks for a document parser.

You’d be our first dedicated marketing hire. You’d inherit a working system rather than a blank page, and your job would be to run it reliably, then make it considerably more ambitious. The natural place to build from is our open source work, which reaches a wide audience and currently does less for us than it could.

This is a hands-on role. On a team of 15, you’ll write the blog post, draft the tweets, restructure the docs page, brief the agency if we hire one, and pull the numbers yourself. We’re looking for someone who's done this work well somewhere and wants to keep doing it, rather than direct someone else who does.

This role has strong potential to grow into a leadership role as we hire more people into the marketing team.

An increasing share of our buyers never touch a search results page; they ask a model. We want someone who takes seriously how Datalab gets recommended by LLMs and agents, how our site, docs, and benchmarks are structured, where models pull their answers from, and how we measure it all. Nobody has fully figured this out yet, and we’d like you to be the person who figures it out.

If you want to inherit a brand book, a content team, and a defined category, this isn’t the right role. If you want to shape how a technical category gets talked about, with real customers and real distribution to work from, it’s a good one.

DAY TO DAY YOU WILL

A typical week might look like: shipping the launch post for a new open source model, ghostwriting a thread for one of our researchers, editing a vertical explainer on tracked-changes extraction for legal teams, restructuring a docs page so a model can actually cite it, answering a sharp question in Discord, and digging into why organic signups dipped last week.

• Own our model launches, especially open source. Every release - Chandra, Surya, Marker, Lift, and what comes next - should lan

[…]
ontent systems.

Bonus points if you

• Have marketed an open source project or built inside a developer community (GitHub, HN, Discord, ML Twitter).
• Have worked on document AI, OCR, IDP, or data extraction - or adjacent infrastructure and developer tooling.
• Have run experiments in LLM/AI-assistant discoverability and have opinions about what actually works.
• Have ghostwritten for founders or technical leaders and have samples you can talk through.
• Are comfortable enough with design to get a launch asset out the door yourself, and know when to bring in help.
• Have marketed into regulated or public-sector buyers, where the proof burden is higher.
• Have hired contractors, agencies, or freelancers and gotten good work out of them.
• Want to build and lead a marketing team, and can tell us why you think you’re ready for that next.
• Are active in the AI community and actually use open-source models and tools.

INTERVIEW PROCESS

• A 30-minute video call with the founder to evaluate fit.
• A 1-hour conversation going deep on a launch you have run, channel evaluation, and selling technical products
• A 2-hour onsite in NYC, working through: traffic and funnel data, a live editing and ghostwriting session using our actual drafts and voices, and a discussion of a short strategy brief.
• Final conversations with the team.

We expect you to use AI tools throughout, including on the prepared brief - we use them constantly and want to see how you work, not watch you pretend you don’t.

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 operations@datalab.to.