Machine Learning Research Engineer

Who We Are

At Twelve Labs, we are pioneering the development of frontier multimodal foundation models that can see, hear and understand the world as humans do. Our models have redefined the standards in video-language modeling, allowing developers to build programs with state-of-the-art semantic search, summarization and analysis capabilities. 

Twelve Labs has raised $107 million in Seed + Series A funding from world-class VC & corporate partners: NVIDIA, NEA, Radical Ventures, Index Ventures, Snowflake and Databricks. Our advisory team features AI visionaries and founders such as Fei-Fei Li, Silvio Savarese, Alexandr Wang and more. Headquartered in San Francisco, with an influential APAC presence in Seoul, our global footprint underscores our commitment to driving worldwide innovation.

About The Role

As an ML Research Engineer at Twelve Labs, you will drive our applied efforts in video embedding and retrieval, multimodal language modeling, and intelligent agents. You will collaborate closely with other engineers and scientists to build the next generation of Twelve Labs models, services, and infra. Scaling our models, data, and training + inference platform, while improving the reliability of our core systems, is the essence of the role. This role is a perfect fit for research minded engineers who want to build SOTA video, vision, and video-language modeling systems!

In This Role, You Will:

• Deliver top-notch applied research solutions to problems like VLM finetuning, auto-labeling of video-text datasets, and model-based filtering of said datasets to optimize (end-)model performance

• Collaborate with our science org to optimize the (e.g.) training/inference performance of our core model stack

• Define a systematic prompt generation and selection strategy for our flagship VLM

• Work across teams to understand and manage project priorities and product deliverables, evaluate trade-offs, and drive technical initiatives from ideation to execution to shipment

• Advance our industry-leading enterprise video solutions by incorporating already-great research into fault tolerant, low latency end to end systems

You May Be A Good Fit If You Have:

• 6+ years of industry experience 

• A passion for, and experience in, both ML modeling and ML/AI systems software engineering

• Strong Python expertise and considerable prior work history with at least one statically typed language (we use Golang)

• An applied bent / are not a pure theoretician: we are an applied science and engineering group at an applied science and engineering company

Strong Candidates May Also Have Experience:

• Publishing research/engineering work on LLMs, VLMs, video models, or contrastive multimodal models in top-tier AI conferences such as NeurIPS, CVPR, ICLR, etc., or have scaled distributed foundation model data acquisition, training, inference, evaluation, etc.

• Optimizing model inference with TensorRT, ONNX, Triton Inference Server, or directly related technologies

• A PhD, or a Master's degree, in machine learning or a closely related discipline

Interview Process

1) Recruiter Phone Screen

2) Initial Technical Assessment

3) Hiring Manager Interview

4) Onsite Technical Interview [In-Person]

5) Final Interview: Culture

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 Twelve Labs.

We are a global company that values the uniqueness of each person’s journey. It is the differences in our cultural, educational, and life experiences that allow us to constantly challenge the status quo. We are looking for individuals who are motivated by our mission and eager to make an impact as we push the bounds of technology to transform the world. Join us as we revolutionize video understanding and multimodal AI.

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.

✈️ Flexible PTO and parental leave policy. Office closed the week of Christmas and New Years.

🛂 VISA support (such as H1B and OPT transfer for US employees).