Senior Backend Software Engineer, Rodeo

📋 Description

• • As a Senior Backend Software Engineer at Twelve Labs, you will play a pivotal role in constructing the server-side infrastructure that underpins our innovative agentic application layer. This is a unique opportunity to join a lean, high-impact team and take full ownership of the critical transition from initial prototype to a robust, production-ready platform. Your contributions will directly shape the scalability, reliability, and performance of our groundbreaking multimodal foundation models, which are revolutionizing video understanding and AI.
• • Your core responsibilities will revolve around designing and building sophisticated backend services tailored for complex video processing workflows. This includes managing the entire lifecycle of video data, from ingestion and transcoding to high-resolution 4K exports, detailed metadata extraction, and intricate timeline operations. You will be instrumental in ensuring these processes are not only efficient but also scalable to meet enterprise-grade demands.
• • Architecting and implementing scalable, high-availability systems is paramount. You will leverage cloud-native infrastructure, specifically AWS and GCP, to build resilient platforms capable of handling substantial video workloads. This involves making strategic decisions about system design, resource allocation, and fault tolerance to ensure continuous operation and optimal performance.
• • A significant part of your role will involve building and optimizing APIs that are crucial for powering both real-time and asynchronous frontend workflows. This includes designing efficient data models, implementing robust streaming data delivery mechanisms, and orchestrating long-running jobs effectively. Your API designs will directly impact the user experience and the overall functionality of our applications.
• • You will be the guardian of performance and reliability for our distributed video processing pipelines. This requires a deep understanding of distributed systems and a commitment to achieving low latency and high throughput, even under heavy load. Identifying bottlenecks, implementing optimizations, and ensuring the stability of these critical pipelines will be a key focus.
• • Close collaboration with frontend engineers is essential. You will work hand-in-hand with them on API design, defining data models that facilitate seamless data exchange, and developing effective streaming strategies to deliver video content and processing results efficiently.
• • Beyond core backend development, you will be deeply involved in ML Integration. This includes integrating and running inference on advanced computer vision models for a variety of tasks such as video resizing, scene detection, automatic audio noise cleaning, and in-depth visual analysis. Your work will bring the power of our AI models directly into our backend services.
• • You will be responsible for deploying and serving ML models on cloud-based or cloud-native platforms. This involves evaluating the trade-offs between building custom solutions and utilizing existing model serving platforms or SaaS alternatives, ensuring we adopt the most efficient and scalable approach.
• • A crucial aspect of ML integration is working closely with our research team to productionize model outputs. You will translate cutting-edge research into reliable, scalable backend services that can be utilized by our applications and customers.
• • Furthermore, you will build sophisticated pipelines that bridge Twelve Labs’ proprietary foundation models with third-party CV models. This integration will empower our intelligent video workflows, enabling more advanced and nuanced video analysis and manipulation.
• • This role demands a proactive approach to problem-solving and a willingness to make pragmatic trade-offs in a fast-paced product environment. You will be empowered to make significant technical decisions and drive projects from conception to completion, contributing directly to the success of Twelve Labs and the advancement of AI in video understanding.