Staff Backend Engineer (Internal Products)

Join TwelveLabs, a company focused on building multimodal foundation models and products for multimodal intelligence and orchestration. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will have full ownership of mission-critical internal products that support model evaluation, regression testing, dataset discovery, and agentic context curation. This hybrid role offers high autonomy and the opportunity to make a significant impact on the company's success.

• Unify the internal data and evaluation platform, integrating various products into one maintainable system.
• Build a secure access layer over large data, making internal data discoverable and queryable across cloud environments.
• Support the product organization's internal agentic content curation, helping to build and harden the internal agent used to pull context across tools and data.
• Full stack capable. You can stand up a usable interface when the work calls for it, but your center of gravity is the backend. We pair engineers with tools like Claude Code for much of the frontend lift, so deep frontend specialization is not what this role needs
• Experience reasoning about multimodal unstructured data (video, audio, images, text). Direct video experience is not required
• Genuine system design instinct. You can take an ambiguous problem, decide what to build, and make architectural calls you can defend
• A track record of building zero to one internal products and shipping them
• Building or integrating AI agents, MCP servers, retrieval systems, or evaluation tooling
• Strong backend engineer with real depth in at least one language (Python, Go, or similar). You design data models, services, and APIs that hold up under real use
• Experience with large unstructured datasets
• Data platform, lakehouse, or pipeline experience across object storage, warehouses, and more than one cloud
• Comfort owning a product outright: scoping it, building it, shipping it, and supporting internal users, while keeping sight of how it fits into science, product, and go to market
• Comfortable as the primary or sole engineer building the foundations for a larger team that can easily onboard onto what you’ve built
• Data governance, access control, or PII handling on production data
• 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 0-1 achiever, a ferocious learner, and a kind and fun team player who motivates others, you will find a home at TwelveLabs