Senior AI Engineer, Tools & Agents

Twelve Labs

Senior backend engineer building and owning APIs for video-understanding AI at Twelve Labs. Collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver enterprise-grade solutions in a hybrid work environment.

Posted 7/8/2026full-timeSan Francisco • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $180,000 - $220,000 per yearWebsite

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Design and own developer- and agent-facing surfaces: public and partner APIs, and agent integration interfaces such as MCP and agent-to-agent protocols.
Build the authentication and authorization substrate: how users and machines authenticate, and how access is enforced (RBAC, organization and team scoping).
Ship enterprise-readiness capabilities: organization support, per-API-key usage tracking and metering, and rate limiting designed around real system constraints rather than arbitrary defaults.
Keep the platform reliable and scalable: define and uphold SLOs, harden failure paths, and keep services healthy under real-world and multi-tenant load.
Move fast without compromising quality, shipping to customers on a tight loop while holding a high craftsmanship bar.
Collaborate closely with engineering and research partners to turn cutting-edge capabilities into durable product surfaces.

Requirements

What you’ll need

Strong backend engineering depth (typically 6+ years) building and operating production services and APIs at scale.
A track record of owning developer-facing or platform surfaces such as public APIs, SDKs, or integration layers, with real care for API design and contracts.
Hands-on experience with authentication and authorization in production: OAuth/OIDC, RBAC, multi-tenant isolation.
Experience building enterprise/SaaS platform concerns: organization and team models, usage metering, rate limiting, quotas.
Demonstrable, hands-on experience with agentic systems, in production or through substantial personal projects, with a strong grasp of agent tool design, MCP and function-calling, and the failure modes of LLM-driven applications.
The judgment to ship fast and the craftsmanship to do it well, with the maturity to know which one a given problem calls for.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Full health, dental, and vision benefits
Extremely flexible PTO and parental leave policy.
Office closed the week of Christmas and New Years.
VISA support where applicable

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

Production ServicesPublic APIsOAuthOIDCRBACMulti-Tenant IsolationUsage MeteringRate LimitingSDK DevelopmentAgent Tool Design

Soft Skills

JudgmentCraftsmanshipCollaboration