Safety Engineer (Backend Leaning)

ABOUT ELEVENLABS ElevenLabs is an AI research and product company transforming how we interact with technology. We launched in January 2023 with the first human-like AI voice model. Today, we serve millions of users and thousands of businesses - from fast-growing startups to large enterprises like Deutsche Telekom and Meta. Our investors are some of the world's most prominent, including Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ Growth and Sequoia. We've raised $781M in funding and our last valuation was $22B - multiples of 11, always. We have expanded from voice into three main platforms: - ElevenAgents enables businesses to deliver seamless and intelligent customer experiences, with the integrations, testing, monitoring, and reliability necessary to deploy voice and chat agents at scale. - ElevenCreative empowers creators and marketers to generate and edit speech, music, image, and video across 70+ languages. - ElevenAPI gives developers access to our leading AI audio foundational models. Everything we do is the result of the creativity and commitment of our team - builders doing the best work of their lives. We are researchers, engineers, and operators. IOI medalists and ex-founders. If you want to work hard and create lasting positive impact, we want to hear from you. HOW WE WORK - High-velocity: Rapid experimentation, lean autonomous teams, and minimal bureaucracy. - Impact not job titles: We don’t have job titles. Instead, it’s about the impact you have. No task is above or beneath you. - AI first: We use AI to move faster with higher-quality results. We do this across the whole company—from engineering to growth to operations. - Excellence everywhere: Everything we do should match the quality of our AI models. - Global team: We prioritize your talent, not your location. WHAT WE OFFER - Innovative culture: You’ll be part of a generational opportunity to define the trajectory of AI, surrounded by a team pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. - Growth paths: Joining ElevenLabs means joining a dynamic team with countless opportunities to drive impact - beyond your immediate role and responsibilities. - Learning & development: ElevenLabs proactively supports professional development through an annual discretionary stipend. - Social travel: We also provide an annual discretionary stipend to meet up with colleagues each year, however you choose. - Annual team offsite: Each year, we bring your entire team together in a new location - past offsites have included Croatia, Italy and Cancún - Co-working: If you’re not located near one of our main hubs, we offer a monthly co-working stipend. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Build safety systems: Design, develop, and scale automated moderation systems, abuse detection capabilities, and guardrails for AI agents across ElevenLabs’ products. - Respond to emerging threats: Partner closely with the Investigations team to identify emerging abuse patterns, understand evolving threats, and continuously improve existing safety systems, detection mechanisms, and guardrails to address new risks. - Own production infrastructure: Build and maintain a growing ecosystem of internal safety services, taking ownership of their architecture, deployment, reliability, monitoring, and ongoing operation. - Bring ML models into production: Partner closely with ML engineers to deploy and integrate fine-tuned and proprietary ML models into production safety systems, ensuring they operate reliably and efficiently at scale. - Build end-to-end solutions: Develop backend services, APIs, internal tools, and user-facing interfaces that enable effective moderation, safety operations, and policy enforcement. - Collaborate across teams: Work closely with Product, Legal, and Safety Policy teams to translate business, regulatory, and policy requirements into scalable engineering solutions. - Product: Understand and navigate the tradeoffs between product growth, user experience, and platform safety. - Legal: Translate legal and regulatory requirements into practical, scalable safety systems. - Safety Policy: Collaborate on how safety policies are implemented technically, while helping inform policy decisions through an understanding of engineering capabilities and constraints. - Shape our technical direction: Contribute to architectural decisions and help define how our safety infrastructure evolves as our products, users, and safety challenges grow. REQUIREMENTS - 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems. - Strong backend engineering experience, including designing APIs, working with databases, and building scalable services. - Proficiency in Python and experience with modern backend frameworks. - Experience building and maintaining distributed systems and cloud-based applications. - Comfortable owning systems end to end, from technical design and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and ongoing maintenance. - Experience working across different parts of the stack, with the ability to build internal tools or frontend interfaces when needed. - Strong problem-solving skills and an ability to navigate ambiguous requirements and make pragmatic engineering decisions. - Ability to collaborate effectively with engineers and non-technical stakeholders across different functions. BONUS - Experience building Trust & Safety, content moderation, fraud detection, or abuse prevention systems. - Experience building guardrails or safety infrastructure for AI agents and LLM-based applications. - Experience deploying and integrating ML models into production applications. - Familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP). - Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Prometheus and Grafana. - Experience with React or other modern frontend frameworks. - Experience with real-time data processing, event-driven architectures, or technologies such as Kafka and Redis. LOCATION