Staff Backend Engineer, Internal Products

Doist; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision benefits

Flexible PTO

Hybrid work model

Job summary

TwelveLabs is hiring a backend engineer to own and build internal data and evaluation platforms that support model evaluation, regression testing, dataset discovery, and agentic content curation. This is a hybrid, high-autonomy role and the first on the team.

You will design data models, services, and APIs, implement secure access controls for petabyte-scale data, and ship mission-critical internal products used by science, product, and engineering.

Qualifications

• Strong backend engineer with depth in Python or Go.
• Solid system design instinct and defendable decisions.
• Track record building internal products from zero to one.
• Comfort leading as the primary engineer on foundational work.
• Ownership of a product from scoping to shipping and support.
• Experience with large unstructured datasets.
• Full stack capability with backend focus.

Responsibilities

• Unify internal data and evaluation platform across teams.
• Build secure access layer over petabyte-scale data with PII controls.
• Incorporate customer signal into data curation and evaluations.
• Develop and harden internal agent context across tools and data.

Skills

Backend engineering

Python

Go

System design

Unstructured data

APIs

Full stack

Product ownership

Job description

Who We Are:

Video is 90% of the world's data. Most of it is invisible to machines. TwelveLabs builds the intelligence layer to change that. Our multimodal AI models understand video the way humans do — across sight, sound, and motion — and power production-scale AI workloads across media, entertainment, sports, security, and government. We have raised more than $210 million from NEA, Radical Ventures, Amazon, NVIDIA, Snowflake, Databricks, Index Ventures, NAVER Ventures, Korea Investment Partners, Quadrille Capital, Red Bull Ventures, and AI pioneers including Fei-Fei Li, Silvio Savarese, and Alexandr Wang. We are a global company, headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Seoul, New York, and London, and employees around the world. We believe the differences in our cultural, educational, and life experiences make our products stronger. Building technology that understands the world in all its complexity requires people who see it from every angle. We are looking for individuals who are driven by hard problems and want their work to matter. Come build it with us!

About the Role:

TwelveLabs builds multimodal foundation models and products for multimodal intelligence and orchestration. The quality of those models and products depends on the quality of the data and evaluation work behind them, and that work depends on the internal tools the team uses daily. This role will own and build internal products to support model evaluation, regression testing, dataset discovery, and agentic context curation. This is a hybrid, high autonomy role and the first on this team. You will have full ownership and drive implementation of mission-critical internal products for all members of TwelveLabs.

Responsibilities

• Unify the internal data and evaluation platform. Pull the internal beta access, evaluation, regression, and dataset discovery/cataloging products into one maintainable system that science, product, and engineering use every day.
• Build a secure access layer over very large data. Make our internal data discoverable and queryable across cloud environments, at petabyte scale, with the access controls and PII handling needed to work safely with production and customer content.
• Bring real customer signal into the loop. Integrate feedback and usage data from our self-serve product so the team can ground datasets and evaluations in actual customer behavior rather than abstractions.
• Support the product org's internal agentic content curation. Help build and harden the internal agent the product team uses to pull context across its tools and data, and move it from prototype toward something the wider org can use, with proper access controls behind it.

Qualifications

• Strong backend engineer with real depth in at least one language (Python, Go, or similar). You design data models, services, and APIs that hold up under real use.
• Genuine system design instinct. You can take an ambiguous problem, decide what to build, and make architectural calls you can defend.
• A track record of building zero to one internal products and shipping them.
• Comfortable as the primary or sole engineer building the foundations for a larger team that can easily onboard onto what you've built.
• Comfort owning a product outright: scoping it, building it, shipping it, and supporting internal users, while keeping sight of how it fits into science, product, and go-to-market.
• Experience with large unstructured datasets.
• Full stack capable. You can stand up a usable interface when the work calls for it, but your center of gravity is the backend. We pair engineers with tools like Claude Code for much of the frontend lift, so deep frontend specialization is not what this role needs.

Preferred Skills

• Data platform, lakehouse, or pipeline experience across object storage, warehouses, and more than one cloud.
• Experience reasoning about multimodal unstructured data (video, audio, images, text). Direct video experience is not required.
• Building or integrating AI agents, MCP servers, retrieval systems, or evaluation tooling.
• Data governance, access control, or PII handling on production data.

Even if there are a few checkboxes that aren't ticked through your prior experience, we still encourage you to apply! If you are a 0-1 achiever, a ferocious learner, and a kind and fun team player who motivates others, you will find a home at TwelveLabs. We are a global company that values the uniqueness of each person's journey. It is the differences in our cultural, educational, and life experiences that allow us to constantly challenge the status quo. We are looking for individuals who are motivated by our mission and eager to make an impact as we push the bounds of technology to transform the world. Join us as we revolutionize video understanding and multimodal AI.

Benefits and Perks

• An open and inclusive culture and work environment.
• Work closely with a collaborative, mission-driven team on cutting-edge AI technology.
• Full health, dental, and vision benefits.
• Flexible PTO and parental leave policy.
• Office closed the week of Christmas and New Years.