Twelve Labs
Senior Engineering Manager, Search - Cognition System
2w ago
WorldwideSeniorRemotesearch systemsvideo embeddingmultimodal modelsfull-stack development
Manage and lead the Search engineering team focusing on video search systems using cutting-edge multimodal AI models.
About the company
- At Twelve Labs, we are pioneering the development of cutting-edge multimodal foundation models that have the ability to comprehend videos just like humans do. Our models have redefined the standards in video-language modeling, empowering us with more intuitive and far-reaching capabilities, and fundamentally transforming the way we interact with and analyze various forms of media.
- With a remarkable $107 million in Seed and Series A funding, our company is backed by top-tier venture capital firms such as NVIDIA’s NVentures, NEA, Radical Ventures, and Index Ventures, and prominent 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.
- We are a global company that values the uniqueness of each person's journey. If you're a zero-to-one achiever, a ferocious learner, and a kind team player who motivates others, you'll find a home at TwelveLabs. Even if you don't meet every qualification listed, we encourage you to apply.
- This team owns Search at TwelveLabs end-to-end. From the core retrieval platform to the agentic search layer, we build the foundation for how both humans and AI agents discover and explore video.
- Full-stack search systems: TwelveLabs is defining the future of video search, powered by the world’s leading video embedding model (Marengo) and video-language model (Pegasus). We build the full search stack—from keyword and semantic retrieval to multimodal and agentic search—enabling fast, accurate, and scalable search experiences.
- Search for humans and agents: As AI agents increasingly become the primary consumers of search, we’re building production-grade search infrastructure and agentic search systems that scale to millions of hours of video while delivering reliable, high-quality results for both human users and autonomous agents.
- Global impact: Our team operates at the intersection of cutting-edge research and real-world products, turning breakthroughs into customer value on rapid iteration cycles and powering video understanding for customers around the globe.
Responsibilities
- As the Senior Engineering Manager, Search for our Cognition System, you will own and lead the team that builds search at TwelveLabs end to end, This includes both the core search & retrieval platform and the agentic search harness on top of it. Your goal is not to build a cool demo, but a production system that ingests millions of hours of video and serves queries at very high RPS.
- We're looking for a technical leader who understands:
- The complexity and engineering rigor required to stand up a production-grade search system that scales to millions of hours across both ingestion and index creation.
- The agentic search harness that reasons about user intent (human and agent) across millions of videos to surface what the user is truly asking for.
- You are also a people manager who leads both senior and junior engineers and scientists . You are not a day-to-day IC, but you read traces, review code, and debate architecture as a peer and you make sure the system works in production, not just in a demo.
- Own the search system end-to-end (e.g., vector/ANN indexing, lexical retrieval, hybrid fusion, reranking, and temporal (segment-level) search), built on Marengo embeddings and Pegasus and scaled to millions of hours across both ingestion and index creation.
- Design and build the agentic search harness that infers human and agent intent and orchestrates multi-turn, session-based (conversational), and parallel search sessions, including subagents that can be invoked by a primary agent.
- Set and own the search-quality bar for both human- and agent-initiated search, and drive continuous improvement against them.
- Own reliability and systems design for the search stack so the system stays dependable as both human and agent traffic grows.
- Drive cross-functional alignment with Research/Training, Platform/Infra, and Product on retrieval strategy, API contracts, and system boundaries.
- Build and lead the team: recruit strong engineers and scientists, set engineering patterns and standards across the search stack, and raise the bar through architecture review, code review, and technical mentorship.
Requirements
- 7+ years building production ML or search systems, with deep experience in search, retrieval, or recommendation at scale.
- Engineering leadership where you've built and led teams of engineers (and scientists), and you can attract, hire, and grow senior ICs.
- Deep experience with information retrieval systems (e.g. embedding-based search, lexical search (BM25 / OpenSearch / Elasticsearch), hybrid retrieval, reranking, and score normalization) at production scale.
- Strong system-design instincts across ML infrastructure, distributed systems, and developer-facing platforms.
Nice to have
- Experience building agentic search systems
- Experience with multimodal or video search/retrieval
- Familiarity with knowledge graph construction, entity resolution, or graph-backed retrieval.
- Good English communication skills, verbal and written.
Conditions
- 글로벌 B2B 고객과 함께 성장하는 Global Team
- 자율성과 협업을 모두 갖춘 하이브리드 근무
- 전 직원에게 맥북 및 70만 원 상당 재택근무 장비 지원, 3년 주기로 최신 장비 교체
- 식사·교통비 등 자유롭게 사용할 수 있는 월 60만 원 한도 법인카드 제공
- 사무실 내 스낵바(간식, 커피, 신선식품 제공)
- 연말 2주간 겨울방학 운영
- 연 1회 건강검진 지원
- 영어교육 프로그램 지원