--- title: 'Controller at LanceDB' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/controller-lancedb-united-states-6rafknnjaa3f' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-06' --- # Controller at LanceDB - **Company:** LanceDB - **Location:** United States - **Compensation:** $225k–$250k - **Employment:** full-time - **Posted:** 2026-08-24 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-06 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/lancedb/af00c0c3-776d-4dce-a9cc-a208af4975aa ## Job description ## ABOUT LANCEDB AI advances at the speed of its research, and research moves at the speed of its data. LanceDB is the AI-native Multimodal Lakehouse: one system where a researcher curates petabytes of video, audio, and every signal derived from them with a few lines of Python, and the next training run starts as fast as the next idea. Customers like Runway, Midjourney, and Netflix build the future of AI on LanceDB, from frontier and world models to robots and autonomous vehicles. ## ABOUT THE ROLE As the Controller at LanceDB, you will own the company’s accounting function and build the financial infrastructure needed to support the next stage of growth. You'll partner closely with the Leadership team, GTM and Engineering to deliver a reliable financial close, maintain strong financial controls and compliance, and provide leaders with clear and timely financial information. This is an opportunity to be the first Controller at a fast-growing company and build a critical function from the ground up. You’ll have significant ownership over the accounting function and the opportunity to establish the processes, systems and team that will support LanceDB through its next phases of growth. ## WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own accounting operations: Lead day-to-day accounting operations, including accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll accounting, fixed assets, accruals, prepaids, and general ledger management. - Lead financial close and reporting: Own the monthly, quarterly, and annual financial close process, including preparation of financial statements and supporting schedules, to deliver accurate and timely financial results for the company. - Own financial systems and infrastructure: Own and continuously improve the company's financial systems and accounting technology stack, including the ERP and related integrations, with a focus on scalability, accuracy, automation, and efficiency. - Manage tax and compliance: Oversee corporate income tax, sales/use tax, payroll tax, and other applicable federal, state, and local tax and licensing requirements in partnership with external advisors. - Scale the accounting function: Prepare the company for increasing financial complexity, including future fundraising, audit requirements, and potential international expansion, by establishing scalable processes, controls, and reporting infrastructure. - Partner with leadership: Serve as a trusted financial partner to the CFO, executives, and cross-functional leaders, translating accounting and financial issues into clear business implications and actionable recommendations. - Build and lead the accounting team: Attract, hire, develop, and retain the accounting team as the company scales. Manage our outsourced accounting firm and serve as a hands-on leader and mentor to the team. ## WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 8+ years of progressive accounting experience, ideally at a high-growth technology or SaaS company. - Proven track record of building accounting functions, systems, processes, and controls from the ground up and scale them as the business grows. - Strong technical accounting foundation and deep understanding of US GAAP. - Excellent analytical, organizational, communication and problem-solving skills. - Ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced, ambiguous and highly collaborative environment. - Strong business judgment and the ability to balance strategic thinking with hands-on execution. - Experience partnering cross-functionally with Legal, People, Operations and executive leadership. - Experience hiring, developing and managing an accounting team. - Passion for building strong foundations and relationships that enable a company to scale. ## NICE TO HAVE (IF APPLICABLE) - CPA or equivalent accounting qualification. - Experience at a venture-backed, Series B or later technology company. - Experience implementing an ERP and broader finance technology stack. - Experience with revenue recognition for subscription or usage-based business models. - Experience supporting investor relations. - Experience working with lean, distributed and remote-first teams. ## About LanceDB ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: AI data infrastructure / vector databases / multimodal lakehouse - **Target customers**: B2B – AI/ML teams, enterprises building generative AI, recommendation systems, and large-scale training pipelines. - **Mission/purpose statement**: “Build Better Models, Faster” by providing a unified foundation to accelerate training dataset development. ## Products & Services - **Embedded Vector Database**: Open-source vector database for multimodal AI, scaling to billions of embeddings with minimal management. Supports vector/semantic, full-text, and hybrid search combined with SQL filters. - **Multimodal Lakehouse (LanceDB Enterprise)**: A unified platform for curation, feature engineering, retrieval, and training at massive scale. Includes automated pre-processing, versioning, branching, and rollback. - **LanceDB Cloud**: Managed cloud service with auto re-indexing, caching, and a management dashboard – no server management required. - **Lance Format**: A modern columnar data format optimized for AI training, analytics, and retrieval – significantly faster than Parquet and WebDataset. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed - **Key Metric**: Total funding $41.1M; annual revenue $1.2M (LinkedIn estimate) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Theory Ventures (led Series A), CRV, Swift Ventures, Y Combinator. - **Growth Signals**: - Headcount: 32 employees (+135% YoY, +9.3% monthly growth) - Customers include Midjourney, Runway (testimonials on lancedb.com) - 11,382 LinkedIn followers (+60.1% yearly) - 6 active job postings; monthly job posting trend +20% ## Competitive Advantages - **Open-source core** with a permissive license, enabling community adoption and vendor lock-in avoidance. - **Lance columnar format** – purpose-built for AI workloads, offering fast random access, column appends without rewriting, and 70% Model FLOPS Utilization (MFU) during training. - **Multimodal by design** – stores vectors, images, tensors, video, and metadata in a single table, replacing 3–4 different data stores. - **SSD-based ANN index** – scales beyond memory for low-latency billion-scale vector search on a single node. ## Strategic Focus - Accelerate development of the Multimodal Lakehouse (announced with Series A) - Expand enterprise features (managed cloud, security, compliance) - Grow ecosystem integrations (Spark, Python UDFs, etc.) - Scale go-to-market and customer success (hiring Forward Deployed Engineers, Solutions Engineers) ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Startup environment with deep open-source roots; founders are former pandas co-author (Chang She) and HDFS/core contributor (Lei Xu). Engineering-heavy team (38% technical). - **Remote/hybrid policy**: Not explicitly stated; likely flexible given distributed team (US, Canada, China) and startup nature. - **Notable perks/engineering culture**: Work on foundational AI infrastructure used by Midjourney and Runway. Opportunities to contribute to open-source, build in Rust, and shape the multimodal data ecosystem. Fast-growing company with strong investor backing. ## Sources 1. [lancedb.com](https://www.lancedb.com/) 2. [crunchbase.com](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lancedb) 3. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/lancedb) 4. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/lancedb) 5. 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