Director of Engineering, Twelve Labs

• This is a role for a builder who leads from the front
• You're deeply technical, close to the code on the things that matter, and energized by the challenge of shipping high-quality products in a fast-moving AI company
• You pair strong people leadership with the judgment to make sound technical and product trade-offs under ambiguity
• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience
• 7+ years of engineering leadership experience leading multiple teams (through Engineering Managers and Staff+ Individual Contributors)
• Experience building intelligent or agentic systems: agent platforms, tool-use frameworks, multi-step orchestration, or autonomous workflows on top of foundation models. You understand both the product surface and the underlying system complexity these require
• Track record of shipping delightful, polished end-user experiences — you care deeply about what customers see, touch, and feel, and you hold a high bar for product quality, responsiveness, and craft.customer-facing
• Strong system design instincts with the ability to review architecture, challenge assumptions, and guide high-quality technical decisions
• Demonstrated experience building high-velocity engineering cultures: small batches, rapid iteration, tight feedback loops, and a bias toward getting working software in front of users quickly
• Excellent people leadership: hiring world-class engineers, performance management, coaching, and growing future engineering leaders. You've built teams that ship fast and sustain quality
• Strong communication skills with the ability to align cross-functional teams around priorities, trade-offs, and deadlines

Desirable

• We're looking for a Director of Engineering, Agentic AI to lead TwelveLabs’ agentic platform and related developer experience (APIs, SDKs & tooling) that enables developers to build video-native agents—while also owning flagship end-user applications that validate and accelerate the platform
• You will own the full journey from agent capabilities to production user applications
• You'll build and lead multiple engineering teams, drive execution with speed and predictability, and shape the technical direction of our product stack
• Drive the development of TwelveLabs' video agent platform:
• Video ingestion & indexing that enables complex agentic workflows
• Agent orchestration runtime and core capabilities such as planning, tool use, multi-step reasoning
• Tooling for evaluation, observability, and debugging
• Reliability, latency, and cost-to-serve for agent workflows
• Safety/guardrails for agent actions
• Own the end-to-end delivery of flagship end-user applications — from concept through launch and iteration
• Own the platform product surface: API design and SDKs
• Own delivery, quality, and operational excellence across your teams
• Drive fast, predictable release cycles: planning, weekly reviews, and retrospectives that lead to improvements
• Translate product and company goals into clear technical plans, milestones, and timelines. Make trade-offs explicit and manage dependencies across teams
• Build, lead, and grow your teams (through TLMs and Senior/Staff ICs)
• Hire exceptional talent and raise the bar continuously. Coach and develop leaders, manage performance decisively, and build clear growth paths for managers and ICs alike
• Create a culture of ownership, speed, and craft — where teams ship with urgency but never sacrifice reliability or user experience
• Stay hands-on where it matters most: architectural decisions, critical-path code reviews, and high-risk technical areas
• Set and enforce a high quality bar across the stack: testing strategy, performance, reliability, observability, and CI/CD practices
• Own production readiness: instrumentation, incident hygiene, latency, security and cost-to-serve
• Collaborate deeply with Product, Design, and Research to define product direction and ensure engineering execution matches the product vision
• Work closely with modeling teams to translate model capabilities into reliable, production-grade product features
• Represent engineering in leadership forums and contribute to company-wide technical strategy