Esther Kim

Hiring to build Multimodal Understanding AI together

South Korea

About

I'm an engineering leader but at the core, I'm an enabler. Problem-solving is table stakes; what I care about is making ideas real. After more than a decade building infrastructure and leading teams, I've come to see my role as turning what exists only in someone's imagination into tangible systems that teams can actually use, scale, and build on. Currently, I'm Director of Engineering at TwelveLabs, where I lead both Platform Engineering and Product Engineering for a startup building video foundation models. I own the infrastructure that trains and serves our multimodal AI at scale, and the API layer developers and customers rely on every day. Previously, I spent 7 years at NEXON and Electronic Arts shipping live online games, 2 years building SK Telecom's cloud-native platform, and led site reliable engineering at Codebrick as a Lead. I'm most passionate about bridging distributed teams — our engineering works across Seoul and San Francisco, and a big part of my job is making that actually work. I also care about mentoring engineers through the IC-to-leadership transition, something I navigated myself over the last few years.

Experience

  • Twelve Labs ()
    • Director of Product Engineering
      Nov 2024 - Present · 1 yr 9 mos

    • Engineering Manager
      Jun 2023 - Nov 2024 · 1 yr 6 mos

    • Senior Software Engineer
      Nov 2022 - May 2023 · 7 mos

  • Lead Developer at Codebrick
    Aug 2021 - Oct 2022 · 1 yr 3 mos

  • Manager at SK Telecom
    Aug 2019 - Aug 2021 · 2 yrs 1 mo

  • Software Engineer at Electronic Arts (EA)
    Jul 2015 - Jul 2019 · 4 yrs 1 mo

  • Server Engineer at NEXON Co., Ltd. (Global Head Quarter/Japan)
    Nov 2012 - Jun 2015 · 2 yrs 8 mos