The team you'd join
ElevenLabs has grown from 15 people at Series A, TechCrunch reported, to roughly 880 today without a single job title on its org chart. The careers page states it plainly: impact replaces hierarchy, and no task sits above or beneath anyone. That philosophy shapes who gets hired and how teams form.
Engineering sits at the center. The Org lists six engineers on the current engineering team: Tim von Känel (VP Of Backend Engineering), Alexander Holt (Field CTO), Angelos Perivolaropoulos (Research Engineer, Speech-to-Text), Flavio Schneider (Machine Learning Researcher), Nev Flynn (Design & Engineering), and Sebastian Males (Full Stack Software Engineer). These six support the three product platforms: ElevenAgents handles conversational agent deployment at scale: configuration, monitoring, reliability. ElevenCreative covers speech, music, image, and video generation across 70-plus languages, according to Wikipedia. ElevenAPI exposes foundational audio models to developers. Each platform pulls from a shared research core that has shipped Eleven Multilingual v2, Eleven Turbo v2, Eleven Flash v2.5, Scribe, Eleven v3, Eleven Music, and successive Scribe and Dubbing releases between 2023 and 2026.
Beyond engineering, the org chart shows Go-To-Market Strategy at 56 people, Software Development at 35, Dubbing and Localization at 9, Content Production at 8, and Field Engineering at 8. The job board lists openings for General Manager roles in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, an Analyst Relations position in the United States, an Engineering role for ElevenAPI in the United Kingdom, and an Account Executive for ElevenCreative in North America. A Private Equity Partnerships role in New York posts at $8–10 per hour.
The backgrounds reflect the founders' DNA. Piotr Dąbkowski brought Google machine learning experience. Mati Staniszewski brought Palantir deployment strategy. Current postings ask for proven production shipping, LLM and RAG fluency, Python and SQL depth, systems thinking around security and blast radius, and hands-on GCP, Kubernetes, and Docker operation. The company says it prioritizes talent over location, a global team by design.
An Internal AI Engineer role illustrates the hybrid profile ElevenLabs seeks. The position sits embedded across GTM, Operations, and Finance, co-designing agentic workflows that eliminate manual toil. Requirements read like a full-stack AI practitioner's checklist: automation experience in production, prompting strategies, RAG patterns, backend expertise, infrastructure instincts, and a builder mindset that spots patterns and ships fixes without waiting for direction.
Enterprise adoption reinforces the hiring mix. Customers include Twilio, Disney, Cisco, Epic Games, Nvidia, Revolut, Meta, Deutsche Telekom, and Salesforce. That client base pulls for field engineers who can integrate at scale, solutions architects who speak enterprise security, and researchers who can push model quality past demo grade. The company's $11 billion valuation as of February 2026 — up from $100 million at Series A — means the bar moves fast.
Compensation: equity is the main event
ElevenLabs pays like a company that knows its equity is the lever. The median software engineer package in the United States totals $345,000 per year, per Levels.fyi, but that figure masks a wide spread: the same source shows reported compensation ranging from $27,860 for a customer-service role in the Philippines to $298,341 for a software engineer in the United Kingdom. The median across all roles and geographies sits at $128,005. For the engineering and research roles most readers target, the bands cluster higher; and the delta between base and total compensation tells the real story.
| Role (US unless noted) | Base salary range | Total compensation range |
|---|---|---|
| Software Engineer | $120K–$180K | $140K–$290K+ |
| Senior Software Engineer | $160K–$220K | $200K–$350K+ |
| ML / Research Engineer | $170K–$240K | $220K–$400K+ |
| Engineering Manager | $180K–$250K | $250K–$400K+ |
| Software Engineer (UK) | £85K–£130K | £100K–£290K+ |
| Developer (US, average) | ~$140K | ~$194K |
Source: JobsByCulture compensation analysis, 2026.
On pure cash, ElevenLabs sits below the frontier labs. Anthropic's senior engineer band runs $300K–$490K; OpenAI's reaches $350K–$550K. ElevenLabs' comparable band is $200K–$350K. Cursor ($200K–$380K) and Mistral (€80K–€180K) bracket it from either side. The gap narrows — and in some scenarios inverts — when equity is factored in. The company has raised $811 million across eight rounds, with valuations stepping from $1.1 billion (Series B, January 2024), Wikipedia reported, to $3.3 billion (Series C, January 2025), Wikipedia's data shows, to $11 billion (Series D, February 2026), Wikipedia found. Employees who received options at Series B have seen paper gains of roughly 10×; Series C grantees have tripled. Equity typically represents 20–40% of total compensation for full-time hires, per employee-reported data.
The compensation model is remote-first with location-based adjustments. US-based roles (concentrated in New York and San Francisco) command the highest total comp. European roles are benchmarked to local markets; the UK software engineer band tops out at £290K total, roughly $370K at current exchange rates, competitive for London but below the US ceiling. First-party board data from Zero G Talent shows recent postings that reflect this spread: that Private Equity Partnerships role listed at $8–10/hour (contract), while the ElevenAPI engineering role and the General Manager post there carry market-appropriate packages for those regions.
Benefits are lean. Health insurance, flexible PTO, remote flexibility across 30-plus countries, and equity participation for all full-time employees are standard. There is no documented learning stipend, extended parental leave beyond statutory minimums, or the perk infrastructure of a Stripe or Databricks. That trade-off is typical for a hypergrowth startup: energy goes to product and revenue first.
The hours are the hidden tax. Multiple employee reviews describe 60-plus-hour weeks as the norm. Dividing a $350K total package by 60 hours instead of 40 cuts the effective hourly rate by about a third. ElevenLabs' work-life-balance score on Glassdoor is 3.6; Anthropic's is 4.3. The company's 4.2 overall Glassdoor rating suggests the mission and equity upside retain people, but the intensity is real. Candidates optimizing for guaranteed cash, predictable hours, or late-career stability will find better fits elsewhere. For engineers who can sustain high output and bet on a liquidity event (the IPO is widely expected in late 2026 or 2027), the equity story remains the primary compensation lever.
The interview loop: five stages, three to five weeks
ElevenLabs runs a five-stage interview loop conducted entirely remotely. The company rates the difficulty at 2.5 out of 5 (moderate by industry standards), but candidate satisfaction sits at roughly 50 percent positive, below the average for comparable AI labs. Glassdoor reviews reflect the split: some applicants describe clear communication and a structured process, while others report interviewers joining calls late, yawning through screens, and offering no feedback after rejection. One candidate wrote that their initial screening call began more than five minutes late with no acknowledgment or introductions, and the interviewer appeared disengaged throughout.
The loop filters for what leadership calls a "founder mindset." From the first screen, interviewers look for a specific story: a problem you identified, a solution you scoped, built, and shipped to users — not as part of a team sprint, but as something you owned end to end. Candidates who default to "we" language struggle. The behavioral round doubles down on this pattern, probing for evidence that you can spot a gap, design the fix, execute it independently, and measure the outcome. Technical interviews favor Python fluency and ask you to reason from user outcomes backward: "the user needs sub-200 ms latency on the first audio chunk" beats "we need a message queue."
ElevenLabs deliberately stripped titles (no VPs, directors, or managers) to screen out hierarchical thinkers and signal that everyone contributes directly. The flat structure removes implicit bias around asking questions or proposing ideas, and it aligns with a research-product flywheel where engineers have direct access to training clusters without approval layers. Leadership has publicly acknowledged 60-plus-hour weeks; the internal work-life-balance score is 3.6. If you need predictable hours, this is not your company.
The 50 percent satisfaction rate stems largely from inconsistent communication between rounds and abrupt rejections without explanation. Candidates who advance tend to prepare concrete "I decided, I built, I shipped" narratives, demonstrate Python depth, and frame every technical choice in terms of what the user experiences. They also show comfort with high autonomy and low bureaucracy, traits the company treats as non-negotiable for a team that has doubled every six months and now lists 183 open roles across engineering, research, and revenue.
Where the work happens: hubs, not headquarters
ElevenLabs runs a hybrid-remote model anchored by a handful of physical hubs that double as collaboration centers, event venues, and cultural anchors for a team spread across 11-plus cities. The primary base of operations sits at 169 Madison Ave #2484 in Manhattan, chosen for its access to a deep talent pool, a thriving tech ecosystem, and proximity to enterprise partners and investors. That New York headquarters houses executive leadership, core research and development, and global business operations, and it serves as the coordination point for the three product platforms: ElevenAgents, ElevenCreative, and ElevenAPI.
In early 2024 the company designated a London office in Soho as its European HQ and "center for worldwide operations," citing the capital's cultural diversity, talent density, and proximity to other European tech hubs. The London site supports go-to-market functions, engineering teams (the board lists an active ElevenAPI engineering role), and partnership work with organizations such as NVIDIA's UK operations. Beyond those two anchors, ElevenLabs maintains offices in San Francisco, Warsaw, Bangalore, and Tokyo, with the San Francisco location staffed by a dedicated Workplace Operations hire who manages day-to-day logistics, events, and vendor relationships, mirroring a similar role posted for the New York "SoHo space," described internally as the company's second-largest hub.
The physical sites are built to support a high-velocity, low-bureaucracy culture. Workplace Operations leads own onboarding experience, curated food and beverage programs, social rituals, and the logistics of internal hackathons, all-hands meetings, and VIP visitor visits. They also manage landlord relations, space planning, and seating charts as headcount doubles roughly every six months. For employees not located near a main hub, the company provides a monthly co-working stipend, and an annual discretionary social-travel stipend lets teammates meet up in person on their own terms. Once a year the entire company converges for an offsite (past locations have included Croatia and Italy), reinforcing connection across the distributed workforce.
Job postings on the Zero G Talent board reflect this geographic spread: the Private Equity Partnerships role in New York, the Analyst Relations position, General Manager openings there, and the ElevenAPI engineering slot. The New York Workplace Operations listing explicitly requires five-day-a-week office presence, while other engineering and product roles operate on a hybrid cadence that prioritizes "talent, not your location." That flexibility is intentional: the founders have said they want to hire the best people regardless of geography, and the office network exists to amplify collaboration when it matters — not to mandate attendance for its own sake.
Who thrives here: the self-selection filter
The profile of a successful ElevenLabs hire reads like a filter designed to self-select. The company's Polish roots (founders Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski met in a machine learning research lab) baked a specific cultural DNA into the organization: direct communication, engineering pragmatism, and a flat meritocracy where "the best idea wins, regardless of who proposes it." Credentials and corporate polish matter less than demonstrable technical ability. That sensibility persists at roughly 880 employees across 30-plus countries.
Remote-first isn't a policy here; it's the operating system. The async culture functions because the team built it that way from day one. No mandatory headquarters, no required office days, no relocation expectations. For an exceptional ML engineer in Warsaw, Lisbon, São Paulo, or Singapore who refuses to uproot for San Francisco, ElevenLabs is one of the few frontier AI labs that genuinely hires globally. The trade-off: remote isolation hits junior employees hardest, and the company's rapid scaling (from startup to 880 people in roughly three years) means management practices, career frameworks, and internal processes are still catching up.
Technical depth is non-negotiable. ElevenLabs trains its own foundational models — voice synthesis, transcription, music generation, voice cloning, intelligent agents. The problems have no textbook solutions: real-time human-quality voice, cross-lingual cloning that preserves emotion, ultra-low-latency streaming for conversational agents. Employees describe working on "problems that don't have solutions in textbooks yet." That attracts a specific personality: someone energized by novelty, comfortable operating without a map, and willing to accept minimal margin for error. The pace leaves little room for learning from mistakes.
Responsible AI isn't performative. Voice synthesis raises real ethical questions — deepfakes, consent, misuse. The company has invested in safety guardrails, voice verification systems, active content moderation, and provenance tooling so users know when audio is AI-generated. People who want to work on frontier AI and care about building it responsibly find that alignment here.
The profile synthesizes to this: technically exceptional, self-directed, intensity-tolerant, globally distributed, ethically grounded, and product-obsessed. If you need structured career progression, mature management infrastructure, or protected boundaries, this isn't your company. The intensity is a feature, not a bug — but it's a deal-breaker for many.
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