Senior Backend Software Engineer, Twelve Labs
Rodeo
$145-190k
+ 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
$145-190k
+ 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
- 7+ years building production backend systems with a track record of designing scalable web services and APIs
- Experience with video-specific tools and frameworks (FFmpeg, AWS Media Services, transcoding pipelines)
- Deep experience with service-oriented architecture, microservices, and distributed systems
- Strong proficiency in Python for backend services, model integration, and tooling
- Hands-on experience running inference on ML/CV models in production — not research, but engineering models into reliable services
- Cloud-native development experience (AWS or GCP), including containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and serverless patterns
- Comfort working across the stack and making pragmatic tradeoffs in a fast-moving product environment
Desirable
- Advanced API design skills (RESTful, streaming, async patterns)
- Familiarity with model serving platforms (TorchServe, Triton, SageMaker endpoints, or similar)
- Experience with MLOps practices — model deployment, monitoring, versioning
- Background in media, entertainment, or video streaming platforms
- Exposure to CI/CD pipelines and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana) for production systems
- Experience with AI-powered product features or agentic application architectures
What the job involves
- As a Senior Backend Software Engineer at TwelveLabs, you’ll build the server-side infrastructure powering our new agentic application layer. You'll join a small, high-impact team and own the critical transition from prototype to production-ready platform
- Design and build backend services for video processing workflows — ingestion, transcoding, 4K export, metadata extraction, and timeline operations
- Architect scalable, high-availability systems to support enterprise-grade video workloads across cloud-native infrastructure (AWS, GCP)
- Build and optimize APIs that power real-time and async frontend workflows, including streaming data delivery and long-running job orchestration
- Own performance and reliability for distributed video processing pipelines with low latency and high throughput requirements
- Collaborate closely with frontend engineers on API design, data models, and streaming strategies
- Integrate and run inference on computer vision models for tasks like video resizing, scene detection, automatic audio noise cleaning, and visual analysis
- Deploy and serve ML models on cloud-based or cloud-native platforms — evaluate build-vs-buy for model serving and SaaS alternatives
- Work with the research team to productionize model outputs into reliable, scalable backend services
- Build pipelines that bridge TwelveLabs’ foundation models with third-party CV models to power intelligent video workflows
Application process
- This role may require participation in on-site interviews and/or completion of in-person onboarding processes
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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