Principal Engineer

TwelveLabs is pioneering the development of cutting-edge multimodal foundation models that comprehend videos like humans. The Principal Engineer will define architectural direction, set platform standards, and lead critical cross-cutting projects to ensure scalability and reliability across teams.

Responsibilities:

• Define and maintain the north star architecture (service boundaries, data flows, contracts) that teams can execute against
• Set and enforce API and platform standards: naming conventions, versioning rules, backward compatibility, deprecation and migration playbooks
• Be hands-on on the highest-impact work: directly lead and implement 1–2 critical cross-cutting projects at a time (often spanning multiple pods). Prototype and productionize platform components when it’s the fastest path to clarity, momentum, and adoption
• Land key pull requests (PRs), author reference implementations and build reusable libraries/golden paths that eliminate repeated work across teams
• Drive platform-wide reliability, performance and cost efficiency improvements
• Architect and guide “deploy anywhere” patterns for enterprise needs (SaaS, dedicated cloud, BYOC, on-prem) with strong security/tenancy and operability principles
• Lead architecture reviews and act as a senior technical arbiter for cross-pod decisions; document decisions via Architecture Decision Records and Technical Design Docs
• Build architecture leverage: coach and mentor senior engineers and engineering leaders; raise the bar on technical design, debugging and engineering judgment