Safety Engineer (Backend Leaning)

elevenlabs; United States; On-site; USD 160,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Innovative culture

Growth paths

Learning & development stipend

Annual company offsite

Co-working stipend

Job summary

ElevenLabs is seeking a skilled backend engineer to design and operate production-grade safety systems for AI products. You will build moderation, detection, and guardrail capabilities, with a strong focus on reliable infrastructure and scalable services.

You will collaborate with ML engineers, Legal, and Safety Policy to translate requirements into practical engineering solutions and contribute to the evolving safety infrastructure as the company grows.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Strong backend engineering experience, including designing APIs, working with databases, and building scalable services.
• Proficiency in Python and experience with modern backend frameworks.
• Experience building and maintaining distributed systems and cloud-based applications.
• C language experience.

Responsibilities

• Build safety systems: Design, develop, and scale automated moderation systems, abuse detection capabilities, and guardrails for AI agents across ElevenLabs' products.
• Respond to emerging threats: Partner closely with the Investigations team to identify emerging abuse patterns, understand evolving threats, and continuously improve existing safety systems, detection mechanisms, and guardrails to address new risks.
• Own production infrastructure: Build and maintain a growing ecosystem of internal safety services, taking ownership of their architecture, deployment, reliability, monitoring, and ongoing operation.
• Bring ML models into production: Partner closely with ML engineers to deploy and integrate fine-tuned and proprietary ML models into production safety systems, ensuring they operate reliably and efficiently at scale.
• Build end-to-end solutions: Develop backend services, APIs, internal tools, and user-facing interfaces that enable effective moderation, safety operations, and policy enforcement.
• Collaborate across teams: Work closely with Product, Legal, and Safety Policy teams to translate business, regulatory, and policy requirements into scalable engineering solutions.
• Product: Understand and navigate the tradeoffs between product growth, user experience, and platform safety.
• Legal: Translate legal and regulatory requirements into practical, scalable safety systems.
• Safety Policy: Collaborate on how safety policies are implemented technically, while helping inform policy decisions through an understanding of engineering capabilities and constraints.
• Shape our technical direction: Contribute to architectural decisions and help define how our safety infrastructure evolves as our products, users, and safety challenges grow.

Skills

Backend engineering

Python

APIs design

Distributed systems

Cloud computing

Job description

About ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs is an AI research and product company transforming how we interact with technology.

We launched in January 2023 with the first human-like AI voice model. Today, we serve millions of users and thousands of businesses - from fast-growing startups to large enterprises like Deutsche Telekom and Meta. Our investors are some of the world's most prominent, including Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ Growth and Sequoia. We've raised $781M in funding and our last valuation was $22B - multiples of 11, always.

We have expanded from voice into three main platforms:

• ElevenAgents enables businesses to deliver seamless and intelligent customer experiences, with the integrations, testing, monitoring, and reliability necessary to deploy voice and chat agents at scale.
• ElevenCreative empowers creators and marketers to generate and edit speech, music, image, and video across 70+ languages.
• ElevenAPI gives developers access to our leading AI audio foundational models.

Everything we do is the result of the creativity and commitment of our team - builders doing the best work of their lives. We are researchers, engineers, and operators. IOI medalists and ex-founders. If you want to work hard and create lasting positive impact, we want to hear from you.

How we work

High-velocity: Rapid experimentation, lean autonomous teams, and minimal bureaucracy.

Impact not job titles: We don't have job titles. Instead, it's about the impact you have. No task is above or beneath you.

AI first: We use AI to move faster with higher-quality results. We do this across the whole company-from engineering to growth to operations.

Excellence everywhere: Everything we do should match the quality of our AI models.

Global team: We prioritize your talent, not your location.

What we offer

• Innovative culture: You'll be part of a generational opportunity to define the trajectory of AI, surrounded by a team pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
• Growth paths: Joining ElevenLabs means joining a dynamic team with countless opportunities to drive impact - beyond your immediate role and responsibilities.
• Learning & development : ElevenLabs proactively supports professional development through an annual discretionary stipend.
• Social travel : We also provide an annual discretionary stipend to meet up with colleagues each year, however you choose.
• Annual company offsite: Each year, we bring the entire team together in a new location - past offsites have included Croatia and Italy.
• Co-working : If you're not located near one of our main hubs, we offer a monthly co-working stipend.

What you'll do

• Build safety systems: Design, develop, and scale automated moderation systems, abuse detection capabilities, and guardrails for AI agents across ElevenLabs' products.
• Respond to emerging threats: Partner closely with the Investigations team to identify emerging abuse patterns, understand evolving threats, and continuously improve existing safety systems, detection mechanisms, and guardrails to address new risks.
• Own production infrastructure: Build and maintain a growing ecosystem of internal safety services, taking ownership of their architecture, deployment, reliability, monitoring, and ongoing operation.
• Bring ML models into production: Partner closely with ML engineers to deploy and integrate fine-tuned and proprietary ML models into production safety systems, ensuring they operate reliably and efficiently at scale.
• Build end-to-end solutions: Develop backend services, APIs, internal tools, and user-facing interfaces that enable effective moderation, safety operations, and policy enforcement.
• Collaborate across teams: Work closely with Product, Legal, and Safety Policy teams to translate business, regulatory, and policy requirements into scalable engineering solutions.
• Product: Understand and navigate the tradeoffs between product growth, user experience, and platform safety.
• Legal: Translate legal and regulatory requirements into practical, scalable safety systems.
• Safety Policy: Collaborate on how safety policies are implemented technically, while helping inform policy decisions through an understanding of engineering capabilities and constraints.
• Shape our technical direction: Contribute to architectural decisions and help define how our safety infrastructure evolves as our products, users, and safety challenges grow.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Strong backend engineering experience, including designing APIs, working with databases, and building scalable services.
• Proficiency in Python and experience with modern backend frameworks.
• Experience building and maintaining distributed systems and cloud-based applications.
• C