Staff Backend Engineer, Internal Products at TwelveLabs
San Francisco, CA
$200,000–$250,000
Jul 27, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
This is a founding individual-contributor role responsible for designing and building internal tooling at a multimodal AI company. The engineer will own a unified data and evaluation platform — covering model regression testing, dataset discovery, access controls over petabyte-scale cloud data, and an agentic content-curation system — serving science, product, and engineering teams. The role is backend-heavy but requires enough full-stack capability to ship usable interfaces independently.
Senior level · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Full-time
Quick apply — this platform usually takes a CV and a few fields.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 1,300 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 980–1,700
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $190,744 (middle half $167,095–$224,501).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 29, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (9)
The posting names Python, Go, or 'similar' as the required backend language — Python is listed first and most prominently; Go is captured as an alternative. The 'or similar' qualifier means the specific language is interchangeable, but backend depth is a hard gate.
API design and data modeling are inferred as hard gates from the requirements section language ('You design data models, services, and APIs that hold up under real use') rather than being named as discrete tools.
Cloud platform experience (object storage, warehouses, multi-cloud) appears only under the 'You'll stand out if you have' section, so it is marked preferred. No specific cloud vendor is named; AWS/GCP/Azure are listed as the common peers.
AI agents, MCP servers, retrieval systems, evaluation tooling, PII handling, and access control all appear exclusively under the 'You'll stand out if you have' (preferred/bonus) section.
Claude Code is mentioned only as a tool the company pairs engineers with for frontend work — not a candidate requirement — but is included for completeness as a named technology in the posting.
The SOC classification is Medium confidence: the role is primarily backend software development (15-1252), but a meaningful portion of the work involves data platform and pipeline architecture (15-1243). The backend/product framing tips the balance to 15-1252.
No compensation range is stated in the posting.
The role is described as hybrid (not fully remote), based at the San Francisco HQ.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): API design.
Read the full posting
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