Staff Backend Software Engineer

### Who you are
- Candidates must be able to travel up to 10% of the time annually to attend conferences, off-site meetings, and other business-related events as required by the role
- This role may require participation in on-site interviews and/or completion of in-person onboarding processes
- 10+ years building production backend systems with a track record of designing scalable web services and APIs
- Experience with video-specific tools and frameworks (FFmpeg, AWS Media Services, transcoding pipelines)
- Deep experience with service-oriented architecture, microservices, and distributed systems
- Strong proficiency in Python for backend services, model integration, and tooling
- Hands-on experience running inference on ML/CV models in production — not research, but engineering models into reliable services
- Cloud-native development experience (AWS or GCP), including containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and serverless patterns
- Comfort working across the stack and making pragmatic tradeoffs in a fast-moving product environment
- Advanced API design skills (RESTful, streaming, async patterns)
- Familiarity with model serving platforms (TorchServe, Triton, SageMaker endpoints, or similar)
- Experience with MLOps practices — model deployment, monitoring, versioning
- Background in media, entertainment, or video streaming platforms
- Exposure to CI/CD pipelines and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana) for production systems
- Experience with AI-powered product features or agentic application architectures

### What the job involves
- As a Senior Backend Software Engineer at TwelveLabs, you’ll build the server-side infrastructure powering our new agentic application layer
- You'll join a small, high-impact team and own the critical transition from prototype to production-ready platform
- Design and build backend services for video processing workflows — ingestion, transcoding, 4K export, metadata extraction, and timeline operations
- Architect scalable, high-availability systems to support enterprise-grade video workloads across cloud-native infrastructure (AWS, GCP)
- Build and optimize APIs that power real-time and async frontend workflows, including streaming data delivery and long-running job orchestration
- Own performance and reliability for distributed video processing pipelines with low latency and high throughput requirements
- Collaborate closely with frontend engineers on API design, data models, and streaming strategies
- Integrate and run inference on computer vision models for tasks like video resizing, scene detection, automatic audio noise cleaning, and visual analysis
- Deploy and serve ML models on cloud-based or cloud-native platforms — evaluate build-vs-buy for model serving and SaaS alternatives
- Work with the research team to productionize model outputs into reliable, scalable backend services
- Build pipelines that bridge TwelveLabs’ foundation models with third-party CV models to power intelligent video workflows