Forward Deployed Engineer, Twelve Labs
More information about location
AI-enabled video understanding technology
Open for applications
AI-enabled video understanding technology
21-100 employees
Open for applications
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
- 8+ years in customer-facing engineering (FDE, Solutions/Field/Partner Engineering, or SA)
- 5+ years experience working with customers in the U.S. public sector with a track record of taking prototypes to production
- Experience deploying complex, scalable products in secure and air gapped environments
Desirable
- Expert Python skills
- LLM/multimodal app patterns: embeddings, RAG/orchestration, tool/function calling, prompt engineering/versioning, offline/online evals, caching/latency control, guardrails
- Cloud & deployment: deep experience with AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform/IaC
- Security & compliance literacy: SSO/OIDC/SAML, KMS/secret management, data isolation/residency, auditable logging/monitoring, etc
- Strong frontend skills TypeScript/JavaScript etc
- Experience with GPU accelerated deployments
- Experiences handling video (you know what ffmpeg is)
What the job involves
- As a Senior/Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, you’ll embed with U.S. public-sector customers to design, ship, and scale systems on top of TwelveLabs’ multimodal models. You’ll lead technical discovery, architecture, implementation, and production hardening—often in regulated or air-gapped environments—while turning field insights into crisp feedback that shapes our roadmap
- You will work hand-in-hand with our Science, Product, and Engineering (SPE) teams, acting as the connective tissue between customer missions and our core R&D. Your work will:
- Feed real-world usage patterns, edge cases, and domain-specific requirements directly to Science for model tuning and research direction
- Translate complex mission needs into actionable Product requirements, influencing roadmap prioritization and feature design
- Partner with Engineering to ensure new capabilities meet operational constraints in secure, large-scale environments
- Discovery: Uncover and understand customer needs and outcomes
- Solution Design: Design scalable, secure, and robust solutions based on customer discovery
- Prototyping & Implementation: Map technical requirements to necessary changes or enhancements for TwelveLabs’ products and implement them
- Production Deployments: Stand up production grade deployments often in air-gapped environments
- Deliver full stack video solutions: deliver video search/retrieval, Q&A, summarization, highlights/captioning, analytics, and more using TwelveLabs models
- Operate in regulated contexts: partner with security/compliance teams, contribute to ATO packages, and meet customer controls and audit needs
- Work with partners: Work with our partners across the public sector to deliver for our customers
- Travel onsite: Visit customer locations regularly both pre and post deployment/implementation
- Deep SPE collaboration: run joint design reviews, co-own POC experiments, and influence API/method updates for video embeddings, video-language outputs, and retrieval features
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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