SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Twelve Labs is building AI infrastructure that enables machines to understand video at scale. Video comprises 90% of global data, yet most remains inaccessible to machine understanding. The company has raised over 300 billion KRW from leading global investors including NEA, Radical Ventures, Amazon, NVIDIA, Snowflake, and others, with advisory support from world-class AI leaders like Fei-Fei Li and Silvio Savarese. Twelve Labs operates globally from offices in San Francisco, Seoul, New York, and London, with core R&D centered in Seoul.
The Forge team builds a B2B SaaS platform that connects Twelve Labs' proprietary AI models to customers. Currently serving individual developers through enterprise customers via APIs, SDKs, and the Playground web application, the team is expanding to build a unified platform foundation supporting authentication, billing, organization management, and consistent data layers across all products.
As Senior Backend Engineer on Forge, you will design and develop core backend systems supporting diverse customer traffic and data scales. You'll drive performance, reliability, and scalability improvements while partnering with product managers, frontend engineers, and ML/platform engineers from design through deployment and operations. Key responsibilities include:
- Collaborating with product and frontend teams from design phase to translate customer requirements into concrete APIs and backend solutions, leading design and implementation of your domain
- Developing and improving core platform systems: authentication, account/organization/permission management, billing, usage measurement and rate limiting
- Building APIs for video data upload, management, and model utilization while maintaining consistent user experience and backward compatibility
- Analyzing bottlenecks as customer traffic and data scale increase, optimizing databases, async processing, and service architecture for performance and scalability
- Owning testing, deployment, monitoring, and incident response for your services, connecting operational findings to stability and security improvements
The Forge team values autonomy and open-mindedness. All members proactively set and execute goals, freely propose and discuss ideas for better products, and engineers collaborate closely with PMs during design phases, with code reviews ensuring quality.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience
- Experience in startups or fast-changing environments, demonstrating ability to lead technical decisions and drive projects under uncertainty
- Deep understanding of backend languages (Go, Java/Kotlin) with production-level system design and operations experience
- Deep relational database knowledge with complex query optimization experience
- Event-driven architecture experience (Kafka, SQS) designing and operating distributed systems
- Cloud-native environment experience (Kubernetes, AWS) designing and operating large-scale systems with focus on scalability, reliability, and operational efficiency beyond basic feature implementation
- Understanding of platform core domains (OAuth/SSO authentication, billing, organization management) with experience implementing complex business requirements technically
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- B2B SaaS or multi-tenant enterprise environment experience with above domains
- Deep Go expertise and hands-on experience
- Experience integrating AI/ML models or data pipelines with backend systems, particularly video processing domain knowledge or interest
- Hands-on experience with video processing tools/frameworks (FFmpeg, AWS Media Services)
- CI/CD pipeline and observability tool experience (Prometheus, Grafana)
