Senior Staff Infrastructure Engineer, Twelve Labs
$240-290k
+ Equity
More information about location
AI-enabled video understanding technology
Open for applications
AI-enabled video understanding technology
21-100 employees
Open for applications
$240-290k
+ 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
- This role requires strong technical judgment, comfort diving into low-level systems when needed, and the ability to shape infrastructure direction by building, operating, and improving real systems
- 10+ years of experience building and operating production infrastructure, with clear ownership of critical systems
- Strong hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS), Kubernetes, and distributed systems in real-world environments
- Strong fundamentals in OS, networking, storage, and compute
- Experience with GPU-based compute, performance tuning, and capacity planning for ML workloads
- Deep expertise in Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and observability (e.g., Terraform, GitHub Actions, Ansible, Prometheus, logging/metrics)
- A track record of combining technical leadership with hands-on execution — you stay close to the system while helping raise the bar for others
- Comfort operating in an early-stage, fast-moving environment, making decisions with incomplete information and iterating quickly
- 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
- As a Sr. Staff Infrastructure Engineer at Twelve Labs, you will combine technical leadership with hands-on execution to build the systems that power our multimodal foundation models. You’ll design and evolve a scalable, secure, and high-performance infrastructure that supports large-scale AI workloads across cloud and on-prem environments
- You’ll influence decisions through technical depth, execution, and results — not hierarchy — in a fast-moving environment
- Architect and evolve cloud and hybrid infrastructure by combining hands-on implementation with technical leadership
- Lead the design of AI/ML infrastructure components and work directly on critical paths when depth is required
- Establish infrastructure standards and abstractions, while staying close to the systems in production
- Collaborate closely with MLE, Data, Backend teams to translate needs into scalable systems, unblocking teams through both design guidance and direct execution when needed
- Own key tradeoffs across reliability, cost, and velocity, making pragmatic decisions in a startup environment
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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