Forward Deployed Engineer, Twelve Labs
$176-220k
+ Equity
More information about location
Video intelligence platform for enterprises
Be an early applicant
Video intelligence platform for enterprises
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$176-220k
+ Equity
More information about location
101-200 employees
Company mission
To set a new standard and unlock the full potential of video for the word.
Role
Who you are
- This is a highly self-directed and creative role where you'll need to thrive in an unstructured, rapidly expanding and evolving environment
- Bring 5+ years of software/ML engineering or technical deployment experience with customer-facing ownership in Media & Entertainment, Sports, Advertising, or video-centric industries
- Have owned customer AI/ML deployments end-to-end from scoping through production adoption, improving them through evaluation design, error analysis, and iterative refinement that tightens acceptance criteria over time
- Have deep understanding of video workflows, video workloads, and media infrastructure including video processing pipelines, content management systems, CDNs, and high-volume data architectures
- Possess strong infrastructure and systems engineering skills with experience building scalable, reliable systems that handle large-scale video processing and storage requirements
- Communicate clearly across creative, technical, research, and executive audiences, translating technical tradeoffs into business impact, risk posture, and measurable outcomes with credibility
- Apply systems thinking with high execution standards, consistently turning failures, escalations, and production issues into improved operating standards and repeatable deployment playbooks
- 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-to-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 Field Engineering team partners with leading organizations in Media & Entertainment, Sports, and Advertising to deploy production-grade video AI systems
- We operate at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development, converting early deployments into repeatable system standards and evaluation practices that scale across commercial environments
- We are hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to push the frontier on what is possible with video AI across content discovery, automated editing, audience insights, monetization, and operational workflows by leading end-to-end deployments of our models inside Media & Entertainment, Sports, and Advertising organizations
- You will embed with customers who are deep experts in their creative and operational domains, translating real-world video data, infrastructure constraints, and business requirements into production systems
- You will measure success through production adoption, measurable workflow impact, and evaluation-driven feedback loops that inform product and model roadmaps
- You'll work closely with Product, Research, Sales, Partnerships, and Engineering to deliver scalable video AI systems that handle high-volume video workloads, meet security requirements, and integrate with existing media infrastructure
- Design and ship production systems around our video foundation models, owning integrations with media infrastructure, video processing pipelines, data provenance, reliability, and on-call readiness across content workflows
- Lead discovery and scoping from pre-sales through deployment, translating ambiguous workflow needs into hypothesis-driven problem framing, system requirements, and an execution plan with measurable business outcomes
- Build in large-scale video environments where performance optimization, cost efficiency, security controls, and scalability shape architecture, operating procedures, and failure handling
- Run evaluation loops that measure model and system quality against workflow-specific benchmarks (e.g. , search relevance, content accuracy, processing throughput) and use results to drive model and product improvements
- Define launch criteria including performance metrics, acceptance benchmarks, and success measures, driving delivery until sustained production impact is demonstrated
- Distill deployment learnings into hardened primitives, reference architectures, integration patterns, and benchmark harnesses that scale across Media & Entertainment customers
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 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 HQ
Northern Waterfront, 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)Previously 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.
Dave Chung
(Co-Founder & GTM of Asia-Pacific)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 & Head of Go-to-Market)Previously worked in Risk Assurance for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Seoul before co-founding Twelve Labs.
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