Staff Backend Engineer, Internal Products

Twelve Labs; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Open culture

Collaborative team

Full health benefits

Flexible PTO & holidays

Job summary

Twelve Labs is hiring a backend-focused engineer to unify our data/evaluation tooling. You will own scalable internal products, focusing on data platforms, access controls, and secure handling of large, unstructured datasets.

Join a hybrid role with broad ownership across science, product, and go-to-market teams. Bring deep API design skills and experience shipping zero-to-one internal products, plus a drive to move from prototype to production at scale.

Qualifications

• Strong backend engineering with Python/Go and API design.
• Experience building internal products from zero to one.
• Experience with large unstructured datasets and data governance.

Responsibilities

• Unify internal data and evaluation platform into one system.
• Build secure access layer over very large data and ensure PII handling.
• Integrate customer signal from self-serve product to datasets and evaluations.
• Support product internal agent content curation with proper access controls.

Skills

Python

Go

System design

Internal product development

Data modeling

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.

You will:

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.

You may be a good fit if you have:

• 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.

You’ll stand out if you have:

• 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.