Staff Backend Engineer - USA

About Inworld

At Inworld, we believe that the benefits of AI should extend beyond business workflows to the applications and experiences that we enjoy every day. We began by pushing the frontier of lifelike, interactive characters for games and entertainment, pioneering realtime conversational AI at scale. Today, we apply that expertise to provide the multimodal models, pipelines and tools needed to build and evolve consumer-scale, real-time conversational AI applications across learning, health, social, assistants, games and media.

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.

About the role

Inworld recently launched an exciting new platform for consumer AI applications, and we’re looking for an ambitious and capable Staff Backend Engineer to join us and take this platform even farther.

• The core of the new platform is the Inworld Runtime, announced in August and currently available as the npm package @inworld/runtime (and coming to more platforms!). The primary idiom is specifying AI computations as graphs, but there’s much more to it.

• API-based model services: In June, we announced our custom TTS models and API, which includes free instant voice cloning. Learn more and hear examples at inworld.ai/tts. Better yet, sign up yourself at platform.inworld.ai/, try out the premade voices, clone your own voice in just a few seconds, and let us know what you think! Beyond TTS, there is also LLM, Knowledge/RAG, STT, and more.

• Data ingestion: The Inworld Runtime generates telemetry data, which we ingest into our cloud Platform and make available for analysis in our web Portal. Ultimately, we aim to understand users and their context to power truly personalized and powerful AI experiences.

• Finally, services for control and optimization, such as the Dynamic A/B experiments that launched in August alongside the Inworld Runtime. We’re just getting started on these deeper capabilities.

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you would be a significant part of one or more of these areas. The key challenges are:

• Shipping quickly. AI is evolving weekly, so there’s a ton of opportunity to be had. We want to move fast to capture those opportunities while they are still fresh and full of potential.

• Zero to one. The platform is not a simple copycat. We have a vision for a deep platform/suite of capabilities that make it dramatically simpler for developers to scale and evolve their AI.

• Realtime, online. As consumer applications become more capable of listening and talking, performance will matter, and AI has to adapt in realtime as well. These are bold but exciting challenges.

Finally, almost everything here is a collaboration with our sibling ML teams, since ML and AI are critical to providing the learning and adaptability central to this vision.

Please note: This is an IC-focused role. We are looking for someone who loves direct technical contribution alongside very capable peers.

What you’ll do

• Establish significant scope: Collaborate with the PMs, engineers and leads to determine the biggest product needs to focus on now.

• Operate with technical autonomy: You have considerable leeway to suggest how to address a given focus area, including bringing in new technical dependencies or standards where it’s the best choice.

• Collaborate, execute, deliver: This is the core of the building loop. We aim to optimize for both speed and quality, despite it being decidedly non-obvious how to manage that tradeoff exceptionally well.

• Reflect and drive improvements: Especially as a Staff Engineer, advocate for and realize system improvements, both related to and independent of key features.

Expected experience

• Excellent programming skills and experience in a statically typed backend programming language, preferably Go, Kotlin, Java or Rust

• Experience developing and deploying cloud-based services to at least hundreds of qps (preferably more)

• Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL or MySQL)

• Hands-on experience with caching (Redis or Memcached), pubsub/queues, data pipelines (Flink, Beam), and Cloud storage

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, can collaborate and coordinate with other roles and engineer with ease, trusted and well-regarded teammate

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with analytics or timeseries databases (ClickHouse, Timescale, InfluxDB)

• Experience with OpenTelemetry

• Experience with C++

Candidates must be based in the SF Bay Area or willing to relocate (you will be working on-site in our South Bay office a few days a week).  

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $180,000 - $280,000. In addition to base pay, total compensation includes equity and benefits. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location, level, and additional factors, including competencies, experience, and business needs. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future.