TLDR: Helping Datum succeed helps you succeed. The best way to progress your career at Datum is to understand your team’s and the company’s objectives, then:
- Ship toward them quickly
- Give and receive direct feedback
- Fix problems when you see them
- Collaborate with curiosity and energy
You are what you do
Career progression in a company that isn’t doing well is hard. When Datum is succeeding, justifying raises and broader scope for people doing strong work is straightforward.
Take pride in your work, your team, and our users. Those three are the inputs that produce the output of career progression. Focus only on yourself and you produce no value. Focus only on your team and you’ll build the wrong thing for users. Consistent care across all three is what compounds.
Datum will support your growth
If Datum reaches scale or a major outcome, being one of the key people who got it there is a rare credential. Companies that build real networks and compute infrastructure aren’t started often, and the people who built them tend to be sought after for what comes next.
Specific ways we help
Work alongside a small team of strong people
We’re less than 20 people and plan to scale only modestly. That means you’ll work directly with everyone — across edge networking, unikernels, SRv6, Envoy, the developer-facing stack, and go-to-market — and you’ll see how decisions get made, from company strategy down to specific lines of code. At our size, learning from your colleagues isn’t a perk; it’s just how the day works.
Real autonomy
We don’t have the headcount to micromanage even if we wanted to. You’ll be pushed harder than feels comfortable, and you’ll get used to making decisions without asking for approval.
Problems that touch the physical world
Most software companies ship software to data centers someone else operates. Datum is building the network and compute substrate itself, so you’ll get a lot of exposure to that aspect of our world. You’ll work on programmable edge infrastructure, work to abstract the physical world in the lightest ways possible, and keep pace with a fast-evolving software ecosystem. The surface area spans systems engineering, networking, distributed systems, developer tooling, and an unusual go-to-market motion built around modern service providers.
Lightweight management
You have someone to talk to without being managed at. Their job is to support you, and we invest in making them better at it. Career check-ins are part of regular 1-1s.
An open-source portfolio
Datum publishes work under AGPLv3, an open-source license, which means your code, designs, RFCs, and the projects you ship are public and attributable. If you do good work here, you don’t have to describe it to a future employer or investor — you can just link to it.
Ways we do not help you progress
A formal career ladder or progression checklist
We find that these create incentives to optimize for the ladder rather than the work, so we don’t have one.
Fancy titles
We work hard to keep titles narrow and flat. The goal is autonomy and equality among people doing the work, not status signaling. Your contributions and willingness to engage should speak for themselves.
Getting a manager to advocate for you
No one else can drive your progression for you, and giving managers that lever creates the wrong dynamic. The motivation has to be yours, and we’re here to help.