Staff AI Application Engineer, Product

Twelve Labs Inc.

Job Overview

Location

San Francisco

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Own and build mission-critical internal products that support model evaluation, regression testing, dataset discovery, and agentic context curation for Twelve Labs’ multimodal AI systems.
• Unify disparate internal tools—including beta access, evaluation, regression, and dataset cataloging—into a single, maintainable platform used daily by science, product, and engineering teams.
• Design and implement a secure access layer over petabyte-scale unstructured data across cloud environments, ensuring compliance with PII handling and production data safety standards.
• Integrate real customer feedback and usage signals from self-serve products to ground dataset creation and model evaluations in actual user behavior rather than synthetic abstractions.
• Support the product team in evolving an internal AI agent from prototype to production-grade tool, enabling context retrieval across tools and data sources with proper access controls.
• Architect and develop backend services and APIs in Python, Go, or similar languages, with a focus on scalability, reliability, and maintainability under real-world usage.
• Design data models and systems that handle multimodal unstructured data (video, audio, images, text) at scale, enabling efficient discovery, querying, and analysis.
• Build full-stack components when needed, but prioritize backend systems; frontend development is supported by tools like Claude Code, so deep frontend specialization is not required.
• Take full ownership of product lifecycle: scoping, building, shipping, and supporting internal users while aligning with science, product, and go-to-market objectives.
• Establish data governance practices including access control, audit trails, and secure handling of sensitive customer and production content.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure internal tools meet the evolving needs of AI researchers, engineers, and product managers.
• Drive the creation of zero-to-one internal platforms from ambiguity, making architectural decisions that enable long-term scalability and team onboarding.
• Work in a hybrid model based in San Francisco, with autonomy to define workflows while maintaining close alignment with global teams.
• Contribute to a culture of innovation by challenging the status quo through technical excellence and a commitment to ethical, responsible AI development.

🎯 Requirements

• Strong backend engineering expertise with deep experience in Python, Go, or a similar language
• Proven track record of building zero-to-one internal products and shipping them at scale
• Demonstrated system design ability to solve ambiguous problems with defensible architectural choices
• Experience working with large unstructured datasets and cloud-based data platforms
• Full-stack capability to build usable interfaces when needed, with backend as primary focus
• Comfort being the primary or sole engineer building foundational systems for a growing team

🏖️ Benefits

• Full health, dental, and vision benefits
• Flexible PTO and parental leave policy
• Office closed the week of Christmas and New Years
• Open and inclusive culture with collaborative, mission-driven team

Skills & Technologies

Python

Senior

Hybrid

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Twelve Labs Inc.

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About Twelve Labs Inc.

Twelve Labs builds multimodal video understanding AI. Its cloud platform transforms long-form video into vector embeddings that capture visual, audio, speech and contextual information, enabling semantic search, summarization, chaptering, moderation and analytics through a single API. Developers upload video, index it, then query in natural language or image to retrieve exact moments, generate highlights or detect unwanted content. Models are pretrained on large-scale web video, continually fine-tuned for accuracy and latency, and deployable on dedicated GPU clusters for enterprise security. Founded in 2021, the San Francisco company serves media, ed-tech, safety and e-commerce customers worldwide.

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