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Twelve Labs builds multimodal AI models that understand video across sight, sound, and motion at production scale. This Staff Backend Engineer role owns and builds internal products supporting model evaluation, regression testing, dataset discovery, and agentic context curation—the first engineer on this team with full autonomy and ownership.
You will unify the internal data and evaluation platform, consolidating beta access, evaluation, regression, and dataset discovery tools into one maintainable system used daily by science, product, and engineering teams. You'll build a secure access layer over petabyte-scale internal data, making it discoverable and queryable across cloud environments while handling access controls and PII safely with production and customer content.
The role involves bringing real customer signal into the loop by integrating feedback and usage data from the self-serve product, grounding datasets and evaluations in actual customer behavior. You'll support the product org's internal agentic content curation, helping build and harden the internal agent used to pull context across tools and data, moving it from prototype toward wider organizational use with proper access controls.
Ideal candidates have strong backend engineering depth in Python, Go, or similar languages, with genuine system design instinct to take ambiguous problems and make defensible architectural decisions. You should have a track record of building zero-to-one internal products and shipping them, comfortable as the primary or sole engineer building foundations for a larger team. Experience with large unstructured datasets, data platforms, lakehouses, pipelines across object storage and multiple clouds, and multimodal data reasoning (video, audio, images, text) is valuable. Data governance, access control, PII handling on production data, and AI agent/MCP server integration experience is a plus. Full-stack capability is expected with backend as your center of gravity; the company pairs engineers with Claude Code for frontend work.
