Software Engineer, Data

Who we are

At Twelve Labs, we are pioneering the development of cutting-edge multimodal foundation models that have the ability to comprehend videos just like humans do. Our models have redefined the standards in video-language modeling, empowering us with more intuitive and far-reaching capabilities, and fundamentally transforming the way we interact with and analyze various forms of media.

With a remarkable $107 million in Seed and Series A funding, our company is backed by top-tier venture capital firms such as NVIDIA’s NVentures, NEA, Radical Ventures, and Index Ventures, and prominent AI visionaries and founders such as Fei-Fei Li, Silvio Savarese, Alexandr Wang and more. Headquartered in San Francisco, with an influential APAC presence in Seoul, our global footprint underscores our commitment to driving worldwide innovation.

We are a global company that values the uniqueness of each person’s journey. It is the differences in our cultural, educational, and life experiences that allow us to constantly challenge the status quo. We are looking for individuals who are motivated by our mission and eager to make an impact as we push the bounds of technology to transform the world. Join us as we revolutionize video understanding and multimodal AI.

As a Software Engineer, Data at Twelve Labs, you will build core data infrastructure for acquiring, preprocessing, cleaning, filtering, and labeling multimodal text-vision datasets for model training. In this role, you will have a larger impact on the quality of our models than perhaps any other engineering role at the entire company: well filtered & labeled data is core to everything we do. This role is a perfect fit for distributed systems engineers who want to advance video understanding by delivering world class systems for *unstructured* multimodal corpora.

In this role, you will

• Acquire, filter, label (leveraging techniques like RLAIF), and sanitize large-scale vision-language datasets for LLM/VLM pretraining
• Scale our data systems to enable our evolution from double-digit to triple-digit billion parameter models (and beyond!)
• Mentor junior engineers/researchers, and hold a high bar around code quality / engineering best practices
• Establish strong relationships with 3rd party data vendors and human-in-the-loop data labeling services
• Build the highest impact, not the flashiest, libraries and services
• Lead by example in interviewing, hiring, and onboarding passionate and empathetic engineers
• Work across teams to understand and manage project priorities and product deliverables, evaluate trade-offs, and drive technical initiatives from ideation to execution to shipment

You may be a good fit if you have

• 7+ years of industry experience (or 4+ with a PhD in a related technical domain)
• A PhD, or a Master's degree, in machine learning or a closely related discipline
• Led teams of 3+ engineers as a technical lead
• Experience building model-bootstrapped language or vision-language datasets (RLAIF, etc.)
• Managed data acquisition for large generative or contrastive models
• Experience with FFmpeg or other high performance image/video processing libraries (bonus points for past work with such processing on GPUs/accelerators)
• Deep experience as a backend and/or data engineer & an interest in ML/AI systems
• Strong Python expertise and considerable prior work history with at least one statically typed language (we use Golang)
• Strong communication skills in written and spoken English

Interview and Onboarding Process:

1) Recruiter Phone Screen

2) Initial Technical Assessment

3) Final round technical assessment & culture interview

4) Reference Checks

We're also excited to share that we'll do global onboarding in Seoul for all new hires (paid company travel!).

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-to-1 achiever, a ferocious learner, and a kind and fun team player who motivates others, you will find a home at Twelve Labs.

We welcome applicants from all walks of life and are committed to equal-opportunity employment. We cherish and celebrate diversity not just because it is the right thing to do, but because it makes our company much stronger.

Benefits and Perks

🤝 An open and inclusive culture and work environment.

🧑‍💻 Work closely with a collaborative, mission-driven team on cutting-edge AI technology.

🦷 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)