Safety Engineer - Free Tier Abuse

Elevenlabs; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

ElevenLabs is seeking an experienced AI Safety Engineer to design and deploy automated moderation and guardrails across a multimodal platform, with a focus on preventing abuse of free tiers. You’ll collaborate with ML and full‑stack engineers to build production‑grade safety infrastructure from the ground up.

This product‑ownership role covers end‑to‑end technical execution, bridging ML research and scalable systems, ensuring observability, reliability, and measurable safety impact.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of backend software engineering experience delivering production systems at scale.
• Strong Python backend expertise (asynchronous Python, frameworks).
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP) and containerization (Docker/K8s).
• Familiarity with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana) and ML/AI model integration.

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable backend infrastructure for abuse detection.
• Architect robust APIs, data pipelines, and services for real-time and batch moderation.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and observability with SLIs and SLOs.
• Collaborate with ML engineers to productionize research models.
• Drive safety roadmap and platform guardrails at scale with precision.

Skills

Backend engineering

Python

Distributed systems

APIs

Observability

ML/AI integration

Security

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Kafka

Redis

React

Job description

About the companythe company 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 the company means joining a dynamic team with countless opportunities to drive impact - beyond your immediate role and responsibilities.Learning & development: the company 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.

About the roleWe’re looking for an experienced AI Safety Engineer to drive the deployment and operationalization of automated moderation and guardrail systems that protect our platform and users across a multimodal space, with a particular focus on detecting and preventing abuse of the company' free tiers. You’ll work alongside a team of ML and full stack engineers to build production-grade safety infrastructure from the ground up.

This is a product ownership role where you’ll be responsible for end-to-end technical execution of our safety systems, from architecture to deployment and monitoring. You’ll bridge the gap between ML research and production-grade systems, ensuring our safety infrastructure is robust, observable, and scalable.

What you’ll do:

Design and build scalable backend infrastructure for abuse detection, deploying AI/ML models into production systemsArchitect robust APIs, data pipelines, and service architectures supporting real-time and batch moderation workflowsImplement comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and observability systems; establish SLIs, SLOs, and performance benchmarksPartner with ML engineers to translate research models into production-ready systems and integrate them across our product suiteDrive technical decisions and contribute vision to the safety roadmap on how the next generation of platform guardrails should be built for scale and precision.

Requirements

Direct experience tackling free-tier abuse, fraud detection, or fake-account / bot farming at scale6+ years of backend software engineering experience building production systems at scaleStrong production backend experience: distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, and Python expertise (asynchronous Python, backend frameworks)Infrastructure & DevOps proficiency: cloud platforms (AWS/GCP), containerization (Docker/K8s), CI/CD pipelinesObservability mindset with experience in monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana) and building observable systemsTrack record of taking products or systems from 0→1 with measurable impact, including deploying or working alongside ML/AI systems in production

Bonus:

Trust & Safety, Content Moderation, or Integrity engineering experienceMLOps experience: deployment, monitoring, and versioning of ML modelsExperience with SQL, data analysis tools, real-time streaming systems (Kafka, Redis), or event-driven architecturesFamiliarity with React or modern frontend frameworks

LocationThis role is remote and can be executed globally. If you prefer, you can work from our offices in London, New York, San Francisco, and Warsaw.

#LI-remote

We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or other legally protected statuses.