Director of Engineering, ML

Who we are

We’re a fast-moving, diverse team pushing the frontiers of artificial intelligence. At Twelve Labs, our mission is to help developers build programs that can see, listen, and understand the world as we do by bringing the world’s most powerful video understanding infrastructure to market. As a part of achieving this mission, we are building foundation AI models that can accurately and instantly search exact moments within petabytes of video archives, generate coherent text summaries of videos, perform prompt-based video generation, and many more. The Twelve Labs platform provides access to its Large Visual Language Models (VLMs) through a suite of APIs that are trained on massive video datasets and learn to understand the meaning and context behind the visuals, conversations, and sounds within videos.

Twelve Labs recently raised $17M in seed funding, recognized as one of CB Insights’ AI 100 companies within a year of its founding, and secured a massive compute resource through partnering with Oracle. We are hyper focused on delivering the Twelve Labs platform to our customers so they can build video understanding into their products and power dream features they could have only imagined.

Part of the pathway to our rapid growth has been paved by the outstanding group of people united by the company’s mission. Beyond prominent venture capital firms such as Index Ventures and Radical Ventures, the Twelve Labs mission is backed by category building luminaries like Fei-Fei Li (Stanford HAI), Silvio Savarese (Salesforce), Oren Etzioni (AI2), Alexandr Wang (Scale), Lukas Biewald (W&B), Jack Conte (Patreon) and more.

We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment where our team members can bring their full selves to work, bring out their potential, and most importantly, thrive together. We welcome kind, brilliant, and open minded people from all walks of life to our team. If joining this mission speaks to you, we encourage you to apply!

About the Role

As the Director of Engineering, ML, you will play a pivotal role in leading our ML Engineering team, expanding our capabilities in video foundation models (VFM) and language models (VLM) for deployment in production. This role involves hands-on leadership in the initial months, transitioning to strategic management to ensure our technology leads the market in speed, efficiency, and reliability. Your mission will encompass building a team of 10-15 top-tier engineers, fostering a culture of innovation, and setting the technical direction in collaboration with the CTO and other key stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities
  • Team Building & Culture: Spearhead the recruitment of ML engineers, data engineers, and infrastructure engineers. Cultivate a culture of excellence and best practices, enabling efficient collaboration across different time zones, particularly between Seoul and the US.
  • Technical Leadership: Align with the CTO and managerial team to establish and execute the technical vision. Ensure the engineering team’s work aligns with the overarching goals of optimizing ML systems for video understanding.
  • Mentorship: Provide guidance and mentorship to engineering managers, fostering their professional growth and leadership skills.
  • Innovation & Strategy: Drive innovations in ML Deployment & Operations (VFMOps / VLMOps), ensuring the deployment pipeline and model serving are optimized. Oversee the data infrastructure, ensuring the quality and efficiency of video data preparation.
  • Ideal Candidate Profile
  • Experience: 10+ years in software development, with a strong background in machine learning engineering. At least 5+ years of experience in end-to-end machine learning system development, including infrastructure, MLOps, and data management.
  • Managerial Skills: Demonstrated ability in leading and scaling high-performance engineering teams, with a minimum of 3+ years in a managerial role overseeing ML engineering or related teams. Proven track record in hiring and mentoring engineers, and fostering a positive team culture.
  • Technical Proficiency: Expertise in video processing, data pipelining, and handling large-scale computing systems. Familiarity with cloud and on-premise infrastructure setups.
  • Industry Knowledge: Experience in fast-paced startup environments, managing teams that deliver complex ML systems.
  • Desirable Experience
  • Education: Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in Computer Science, Math, or equivalent.
  • Research and Development: Exposure to ML research and familiarity with the latest advancements in AI and machine learning.
  • Technical Stack: Experience with relevant tech stack, including Python, Golang, C++, PyTorch, Kubernetes, and MLFlow.
  • 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)
    Apply for this job
    logo Twelve Labs Engineering 🌎 Remote 📍 San Francisco, United States Apply Now
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