Lead Data Engineer, ML Data Platform

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 ML Data Infrastructure Lead at Twelve Labs, you will lead the data team, managing data infrastructure and preparing high quality video data for our training runs. Unlike text or image, video is complex to process (because of size and decoding), multimodal (visual and audio), and has a temporal aspect. Information can become easily redundant while being dependent on earlier information (like text). Because of the complexity of data processing at Twelve Labs, this role will have a significant impact on the quality of our models. 

• Acquire and deliver massive and high-quality datasets for our large training runs.
• Develop and implement best practices and data pipelines (ingest, annotate, and incorporate high-quality datasets into model training and evaluation) by working with internal and external data partners.
• Improve our data infrastructure (e.g., management, versioning) by collaborating with software engineers and security engineers.
• Collaborate with modeling and product teams to evaluate the impact of the data on our models and continuously improve the data quality.
• Hire, provide career growth guidance, coaching, and training for engineers on your team.
• Work across teams to understand and manage project priorities and product deliverables, evaluate trade-offs, and drive technical initiatives from execution to landing.

• 5+ years of experience in managing unstructured and/or human-annotated data (e.g., collecting or assessing sample quality)
• Owned  data initiatives such as data cleaning, data validation, data augmentation, and image or video processing
• Proficiency in Python
• Experience with ML frameworks such as Pytorch and Tensorflow
• 2+ years people management experience

• MS, PhD in Computer Science or a related field.
• Experience with creating large-scale datasets or RLHF-based dataset creation.

Interview and Onboarding Process:

Recruiter Phone Screen -> Hiring Manager Call -> Technical Interview and/or Take Home Assignment -> Culture Interview -> Reference Checks

We're also excited to share that we'll do global onboarding in Seoul for all new hires (company-sponsored 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)