About the role
What we're looking for:
We need a Staff/Principal-level backend engineer with 8+ years of experience building and deploying cloud-based services at scale who thrives in a fast-moving startup environment. You should be comfortable working as a strong IC with technical autonomy, have a track record of shipping zero-to-one platform products, and bring adaptability across tools and programming languages. Bonus points if you have experience with AI products, founder experience, or have worked at high-caliber companies like Databricks or similar AI/infrastructure startups.
What you'll do:
- Own core backend systems for Inworld Router — an intelligent routing layer across 200+ LLMs with multi-provider failover, cost/latency-based routing, and real-time observability at massive scale
- Build and scale API-based model services (TTS, STT, LLM, Knowledge/RAG) powering consumer-facing AI applications with hundreds of millions of end users
- Design and implement realtime, low-latency systems for speech-to-speech and Realtime API products
- Collaborate closely with PMs, engineers, and sibling ML teams to determine the biggest product needs and ship quickly in a rapidly evolving AI landscape
- Drive system improvements and advocate for new technical standards, dependencies, and architectural decisions with considerable technical autonomy
- Work on ambitious new products launching later this year, including platformization of new offerings and system-wide infrastructure projects
Key context:
- This is a pure IC role — no management responsibilities, but strong ownership expected
- Flat team structure reporting to the VP of Engineering (~7-8 person team)
- AI tools and agents are embraced in the development workflow and interview process
- Startup experience is strongly preferred — candidates from only large tech companies without any startup background are not a fit
- Adaptability across tools and languages is valued over deep specialization in a single language
About Inworld
Inworld is a research lab of top researchers and engineers, building the world’s top-ranked realtime voice models.
Today our models are the #1 ranked realtime voice models in the world. They are used to power the largest consumer-facing AI applications available, across categories like health, fitness, learning, therapy, companions, customer experience and media; representing 100s of millions of end users. Our work spans areas like research and development of state-of-the-art models, optimizing realtime inference, and creating best-in-class APIs and products that allow developers to engage their users.
We’ve raised more than $125M from Lightspeed, Section 32, Kleiner Perkins, Microsoft’s M12 venture fund, Founders Fund, Meta and Stanford, among others. Our technology has powered experiences from companies such as NVIDIA, Microsoft Xbox, Niantic, Logitech Streamlabs, Wishroll, Little Umbrella and Bible Chat. We’ve also been recognized by CB Insights as one of the 100 most promising AI companies globally and have been named one of LinkedIn’s Top 10 Startups in the USA.
Required skills
Other roles at Inworld
Job details
Salary
$280,000 - $350,000
Location
Remote
Experience
8+ years
Funding
Total raised
$120M
Last stage
Series A
Investors
Founders
What happens next.
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.