Director of Engineering, Customer Deployments and Partner Integrations

Job description

WHO WE ARE Video is 90% of the world's data. Most of it is invisible to machines. TwelveLabs builds the intelligence layer to change that. Our multimodal AI models understand video the way humans do — across sight, sound, and motion — and power production-scale AI workloads across media, entertainment, sports, security, and government. We have raised more than $210 million from NEA, Radical Ventures, Amazon, NVIDIA, Snowflake, Databricks, Index Ventures, NAVER Ventures, Korea Investment Partners, Quadrille Capital, Red Bull Ventures, and AI pioneers including Fei-Fei Li, Silvio Savarese, and Alexandr Wang. We are a global company, headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Seoul, New York, and London, and employees around the world. We believe the differences in our cultural, educational, and life experiences make our products stronger. Building technology that understands the world in all its complexity requires people who see it from every angle. We are looking for individuals who are driven by hard problems and want their work to matter. Come build it with us! ABOUT THE ROLE With our Series B, we are entering our next chapter: building a full-stack video AI company with frontier models at the foundation, an enterprise platform in the middle, and agentic systems that turn raw video into actionable knowledge and insights. Our customers include some of the world’s leading companies across media, sports, advertising, security, and the public sector. They are asking us to solve increasingly complex problems—not only through our APIs, but by deploying TwelveLabs technology securely and reliably into their environments. As Director of Engineering, Deployment & Integrations, you will lead the engineering organization responsible for deploying TwelveLabs technology into our customers' and partners’ environments and integrating it deeply into their existing technology ecosystems. You will own the engineering strategy and execution for customer and distribution partner deployments across hyperscalers, private cloud, on-premise, and other complex enterprise environments. You will work closely with our Engineering and Go to Market teams to turn complex customer requirements into scalable, repeatable deployment and integration capabilities. This is a highly cross-functional and customer-facing engineering leadership role. You will be equally comfortable working through architecture with a customer's technical team, diving into a complex deployment or integration challenge, and building the systems and processes that allow the next customer to move faster. Your goal is to make TwelveLabs easy to deploy, easy to integrate, and reliable to operate — while turning the lessons from each customer into capabilities that scale across the business. IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL FOCUS ON THE CORE COMPETENCIES LISTED BELOW Customer Deployment - Own the engineering lifecycle for customer and partner deployments, from technical discovery and architecture through implementation, production launch, and ongoing operations. - Lead deployments across public cloud, customer VPCs, private cloud, on-premise infrastructure, and other customer-controlled environments. - Partner directly with strategic customers, partners and their engineering, infrastructure, security, and IT teams to solve complex deployment challenges. - Establish the technical standards, tooling, and playbooks required to make deployments predictable and repeatable. - Turn recurring customer deployment requirements into scalable product and platform capabilities wherever possible. Integrations & Enterprise Architecture - Own the engineering strategy for integrating TwelveLabs into customers' existing technology ecosystems. - Build scalable integration patterns across enterprise applications, data platforms, storage systems, identity and access management, APIs, and AI/ML infrastructure. - Partner with Product and Engineering to translate recurring customer integration requirements into reusable platform capabilities. - Establish standards and tooling that make integrations faster, more reliable, and increasingly self-service. - Balance customer-specific requirements with a long-term architecture that prevents TwelveLabs from accumulating one-off integrations. - Help define the technical architecture and interfaces that allow TwelveLabs to become deeply embedded in customer workflows and applications. Deployment Automation & Developer Experience - Build the tooling, automation, and internal platforms that allow engineering teams to provision, configure, upgrade, integrate, and operate customer environments efficiently. - Develop deployment and integration architectures that move TwelveLabs from bespoke implementations toward repeatable, highly automated capabilities. - Establish strong CI/CD, release management, configuration management, and observability practices for distributed customer environments. - Create an exceptional internal developer experience for engineers responsible for building and supporting deployments and integrations. Product & Engineering Partnership - Work closely with Product and Engineering leadership to ensure deployment and integration requirements are incorporated into product architecture from the beginning. - Identify recurring friction across customer deployments and integrations and turn those insights into product and platform improvements. - Partner with Research and ML teams to understand the operational requirements of serving increasingly capable multimodal models in production environments. - Help define the technical roadmap for deployment and integration infrastructure as TwelveLabs expands its product portfolio and customer footprint. Customer, Partnerships & Cross-Functional Leadership - Serve as a senior technical partner to Solutions Engineering, Sales, and Product on the most complex customer opportunities. - Translate customer requirements into clear technical decisions, engineering priorities, and execution plans. - Establish a strong operating rhythm across customer-facing and engineering teams to ensure deployments and integrations move quickly without compromising quality. - Communicate complex technical tradeoffs clearly to both highly technical audiences and executive stakeholders. Security, Compliance & Trust - Build deployment and integration architectures suitable for enterprise and public sector customers with demanding security and compliance requirements. - Partner with Security and Infrastructure teams to support requirements around data isolation, identity, access control, encryption, auditability, and compliance. - Help establish deployment patterns capable of supporting increasingly regulated and security-sensitive environments. Team Building & Culture - Build and lead a world-class Deployment & Integrations Engineering organization. - Recruit, develop, and retain engineers who thrive at the intersection of distributed systems, infrastructure, product engineering, enterprise integrations, and customer problem-solving. - Create a culture of high ownership, technical excellence, urgency, and disciplined execution. - Establish the processes and operating mechanisms that allow the team to move quickly while maintaining a high bar for reliability and customer experience. YOU MAY BE A GOOD FIT IF YOU HAVE - 10+ years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure, platform engineering, or distributed systems, with significant experience leading globally distributed engineering teams. - Experience leading engineering organizations responsible for deploying complex software, AI/ML systems, or infrastructure into enterprise customer environments. - Deep technical understanding of cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, networking, containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, observability, and production operations. - Experience with Kubernetes, container orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, and automated deployment systems. - Experience deploying software across multiple cloud environments and/or customer-controlled infrastructure, including air-gapped, disconnected, regulated, or highly secure environments - Hands-on experience owning the software deployment lifecycle end-to-end — versioning, release management, rollout + rollback strategy, upgrade paths, and post-deployment operations across distributed customer environments. - Deep experience with software packaging patterns for shipping into customer-controlled environments — container images, Helm charts, operator patterns, installer + bootstrap flows, air-gapped bundles, and dependency + configuration management. - A track record of turning bespoke customer implementations into scalable, repeatable engineering systems. - Strong customer-facing instincts and the ability to operate credibly with senior engineers, architects, security teams, and technical executives at large enterprises. - A bias toward action and a willingness to get into the technical details when the situation demands it. - Excellent judgment about when to build a one-off solution for a strategic customer versus investing in a scalable platform capability. - Experience operating in a high-growth startup where product requirements and customer needs evolve rapidly. - Experience working with globally distributed teams STRONG CANDIDATES MAY ALSO HAVE - Experience deploying AI/ML or GPU-intensive workloads into customer environments. - Experience with public sector, defense, financial services, or other highly regulated customers. - Experience taking an enterprise deployment motion from bespoke implementations to a standardized platform. - Experience building or leading Solutions Engineering, Field Engineering, Deployment Engineering, or Professional Services Engineering organizations. We are a global company that values the uniqueness of each person’s journey. The differences in our cultural, educational, and life experiences are what allow us to challenge the status quo. We’re looking for people motivated by our mission and ready to help build the company that defines how the world understands video. BENEFITS AND PERKS 🤝 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 🌴 Extremely flexible PTO and parental leave policy. Office closed the week of Christmas and New Years 💪 Monthly wellness stipend 📚 Annual Learning & Development stipend to invest in your growth 💼 Global offices in San Francisco, New York, and Seoul, and coworking office memberships for remote team members 🛂 VISA support where applicable 🚆 Transportation stipend (SF & NY onsite only) 🍲 Daily meals provided (SF & NY onsite only)