Growing the Heartex leadership team

I’m excited to officially welcome three new leaders to our company: Joe Alfaro, VP of Engineering; Lauren Sell, VP of Marketing & Ecosystem; and Brandi Bergstrom, Head of Talent. Together we are building a world-class team to solve the hardest problem in data science—building accurate and truly competitive ML/AI models.

As data scientists and engineers, my co-founders Max, Nikolai and I have a deep understanding of the industry and challenges at scale. We knew that empowering internal subject matter experts to curate and add meaning to datasets was the only way to build domain specific models that deliver an extra level of accuracy.

In 2019, we formed Heartex and quickly put our experience and ideas to work releasing the first version of Label Studio as an open source project. As Label Studio quickly became the most popular open source data labeling platform, we were gratified to know we were solving real problems for data science teams and organizations adopting AI. We also knew that every enterprise going through AI transformation would need an Enterprise-level product to meet their needs for compliance, security, scale and business analytics. As we started building the company and delivered the Enterprise product, our next goal was to build a leadership team that would complement our skills, scale our engineering efforts, and bring the most value to our customers

We’ve made a lot of progress on that journey in the last three years, and alongside our recent $25M Series A funding, we’re excited to welcome three new leaders:

• Joe Alfaro joined at the end of 2021 to help scale our engineering team, operations & security best practices based on his decades of leadership experience at companies including Sauce Labs, Reciprocity, GoDaddy and Lynda.com. He recently led our SOC2 certification, and his team continues to deliver new features to our open source project and enterprise solutions.
• Lauren Sell brings nearly 20 years of B2B technology marketing experience with an emphasis on open source communities, ecosystems, developers and product-led growth. Her experience includes scaling Netlify from 500K to 2.5M web developers, and launching the OpenStack project and helping build a $7B market around it, working with an ecosystem of large-scale users and technology companies.
• Brandi Bergstrom joins as our head of talent to help us build a diverse, distributed and thriving team, bringing deep experience from B2B technology and healthcare industries, including Netlify, UCSF, Clover Health, and more. You can check out her podcast with Greenhouse about caring for the candidate experience and building inclusive environments.

With our recent funding and customer momentum, we’re on a mission to advance data-centric AI through open source software, community building, and knowledge sharing. We are a team with passion and ambitious goals, and we are committed to delivering value to our customers and being the best place to work.

We hope you will join us on this mission, whether you apply to join our team, participate in the community, or simply cheer from the sidelines. Check out our open positions to get in touch with Joe, Lauren and Brandi and be a formative part of our company and community.