Chief Architect

TwelveLabs•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer / Architect to define architectural direction across Twelve Labs and help our teams scale with speed, clarity, and reliability. You’ll set platform standards, create reusable components and golden paths, and step in directly to lead and implement the most critical cross-cutting work. This role combines systems-level architecture, high-impact execution, and technical leadership across pods.

Requirements

15+ years of total industry experience in software engineering or AI/ML, designing and shipping large-scale distributed systems or AI/ML systems in production.
5+ years operating at Senior Staff or Principal level (or equivalent scope), leading cross-team technical initiatives that materially changed an organization’s trajectory.
Strong experience in more than one AI/ML domain: computer vision, foundation models (LLMs / VLMs / multi-modal models), search & retrieval systems, AI agents, etc.
Strong distributed systems + API design: versioning, backward compatibility, SDK ergonomics, operational concerns experience.
Proven ability to reduce complexity: converge fragmented surfaces, drive deprecations/migrations and simplify architecture.
Deep production instincts: incident response, observability, reliability engineering, and cost/performance trade-offs.
Comfortable being hands-on in a modern stack (languages can vary; you can ramp quickly and lead by example).
Exceptional written and verbal communication: can drive alignment with clarity and precision.

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.

Benefits

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)

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