Research Scientist, Twelve Labs
$230-360k
Offers Equity
More information about location
AI-enabled video understanding technology
Open for applications
AI-enabled video understanding technology
21-100 employees
Open for applications
$230-360k
Offers Equity
More information about location
21-100 employees
Company mission
To build the best video understanding platform driven by leading perceptual-reasoning research
Role
Who you are
- We’re looking for candidates with strong research experience in areas like video (multimodal) understanding, large language models, domain adaptation, representation learning, or action recognition; especially where those align with our mission. Your experience should be supported by past projects, your contributions, and related publications
- You should be capable of independently leading research projects from ideation to execution. Strong proficiency in Python and Pytorch is essential
- Excellent written and verbal communication in Korean as well as English is a bonus
- A Phd or Masters Degree in addition to significant research experience in computer science, AI, or related fields. Additional experience developing and deploying large-scale ML models in production, or optimizing large model training, is a major plus
- 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
What the job involves
- The Science team is at the forefront of multimodal AI research, tackling the most critical technical challenges in video understanding. Our core research areas include video embedding and search, multimodal language models capable of reasoning over video content, and intelligent agents that can interact with and analyze video data
- We go beyond academic research: our goal is to ensure that research outcomes are directly integrated into products and platforms, delivering real value to users. We work closely with the Engineering and Product teams and foster a collaborative culture centered around open communication and dynamic idea exchange
- As a Research Scientist, you will play a key role in driving TwelveLabs' core technology research and helping define its direction. You’ll conduct pioneering work in video understanding, multimodal learning, and AI agents; identifying critical research problems, designing innovative solutions, and running effective experiments. This also involves developing data strategies and defining evaluation methodologies
- You will lead finetuning efforts for video embedding and video language models, closely collaborating with the MLE and Solutions Engineering team to productionize finetuning efforts. You’ll collaborate closely with team leads, fellow scientists and researchers, clearly communicating your findings and contributing to TwelveLabs’ broader research roadmap and culture
- TwelveLabs takes a focus-and-collaborate approach to tackling complex video AI challenges. Rather than solving isolated problems, we work together as a unified team toward the broader goal of understanding video
- Our research philosophy strikes a balance between rigorous scientific experimentation and real-world application. We aim to build multimodal systems that are not only powerful, but also trustworthy and interpretable
- Open communication and mutual learning are central to our culture, enabling us to quickly evolve ideas and pursue the most impactful research directions. These align closely with our core values: integrity, growth mindset, and tenacity
Our take
Developing an algorithm that can understand text or images is (relatively) straightforward. However, the challenge escalates when it comes to understanding video, where these modes merge with audio, and context becomes much harder to grasp.
Twelve Labs has developed a machine learning solution that tackles this challenge by making the inner content of videos both indexable for developers and highly searchable for users. This technology could prove immensely valuable, with use cases extending far beyond simple searchability for end users. It could be employed for more accurate monitoring of community guidelines on social media, enterprise knowledge searches, and a deeper understanding of the value of video content.
With recent funding under its belt, Twelve Labs is set for rapid growth. The investment will drive R&D, nearly double its workforce, and advance its video understanding technology. As it expands, Twelve Labs is well-positioned to lead the future of multimodal AI and revolutionize how organizations extract values from video content.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Oct 2025
$3m
EARLY VC
Dec 2024
$30m
EARLY VC
Total funding: $110.2m
Company benefits
- Full health, dental, and vision benefits
- Extremely flexible PTO and parental leave policy. Office closed the week of Christmas and New Years
- Remote-flexible, offices in San Francisco and Seoul and coworking stipend
- VISA support (such as H1B and OPT transfer for US employees)
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Jae Lee
(Co-Founder & CEO)After Interning as a Software Engineer at Samsung and Amazon, they joined the Republic of Korea's Cyber Operations Command as a Lead Data Scientist. Co-founded Twelve Labs after this period of military service.
Aiden Lee
(Co-Founder & CTO)Interned at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) as a Deep Learning Researcher. Completed their National Defense duty as an AI & ML Engineer in the Cyber Operations Command.
Sung Jun (SJ) Kim
(Co-Founder)Served for the Ministry of National Defense as a Lead Software Engineer in the Cyber Operations Command. Before this, they were a Cyber Security Research Scientist at Sungkyunkwan University.
Dave Chung
(Co-Founder)Previously a Project Team Lead at the Institute of East and West Studies (IEWS) at Yonsei University, focusing on the planning and development of the Korean Web 3.0 ecosystem (Funded by the Ministry of ICT).
Soyoung Lee
(Co-Founder)Worked in Risk Assurance for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Seoul before co-founding Twelve Labs.
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