Principal Engineer, Twelve Labs
Chief Architect
$300-360k
Offers 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
$300-360k
Offers 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
- 15+ years of total industry experience in software engineering or AI/ML, designing and shipping large-scale distributed systems or AI/ML systems in production
- 5+ years operating at Senior Staff or Principal level (or equivalent scope), leading cross-team technical initiatives that materially changed an organization’s trajectory
- Strong experience in more than one AI/ML domain: computer vision, foundation models (LLMs / VLMs / multi-modal models), search & retrieval systems, AI agents, etc
- Strong distributed systems + API design: versioning, backward compatibility, SDK ergonomics, operational concerns experience
- Proven ability to reduce complexity: converge fragmented surfaces, drive deprecations/migrations and simplify architecture
- Deep production instincts: incident response, observability, reliability engineering, and cost/performance trade-offs
- Comfortable being hands-on in a modern stack (languages can vary; you can ramp quickly and lead by example)
- Exceptional written and verbal communication: can drive alignment with clarity and precision
- 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
- We’re looking for a Principal Engineer / Architect to define architectural direction across TwelveLabs and help our teams scale with speed, clarity, and reliability
- You’ll set platform standards, create reusable components and golden paths, and step in directly to lead and implement the most critical cross-cutting work
- This role combines systems-level architecture, high-impact execution, and technical leadership across pods
- Define and maintain the north star architecture (service boundaries, data flows, contracts) that teams can execute against
- Set and enforce API and platform standards: naming conventions, versioning rules, backward compatibility, deprecation and migration playbooks
- Be hands-on on the highest-impact work: directly lead and implement 1–2 critical cross-cutting projects at a time (often spanning multiple pods). Prototype and productionize platform components when it’s the fastest path to clarity, momentum, and adoption
- Land key pull requests (PRs), author reference implementations and build reusable libraries/golden paths that eliminate repeated work across teams
- Drive platform-wide reliability, performance and cost efficiency improvements
- Architect and guide “deploy anywhere” patterns for enterprise needs (SaaS, dedicated cloud, BYOC, on-prem) with strong security/tenancy and operability principles
- Lead architecture reviews and act as a senior technical arbiter for cross-pod decisions; document decisions via Architecture Decision Records and Technical Design Docs
- Build architecture leverage: coach and mentor senior engineers and engineering leaders; raise the bar on technical design, debugging and engineering judgment
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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