About Inworld
Inworld is a product-oriented research lab of top AI researchers and engineers, developing best-in-class realtime multimodal models and the only realtime orchestration platform optimized for thousands of queries per second.
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.
Your impact
We’re looking for a Staff Designer who will define and elevate the visual and UX quality across every external surface at Inworld. This is a highly visible, cross-functional role for a designer who excels operating horizontally across product, brand, and growth. This role is both strategic and hands-on: you’ll define standards, influence direction, and personally raise the design level across everything we ship.
This role is ideal for a designer with high agency who is comfortable operating with minimal oversight, proactively identifying problems, driving solutions forward, and who brings perspective on AI-native experiences design.
What you’ll do
Own the visual design and UX across all external surfaces from concept through execution
Lead the design of intuitive experiences for state-of-the-art generative AI systems
Provide horizontal design leadership across product, marketing, and growth experiences
Lead and manage relationships with external agencies and vendors, setting clear direction and ensuring work meets Inworld’s quality bar
Establish and evolve design standards and guidelines that enable speed without sacrificing quality
Think about design as a growth lever, using insights, data, and experimentation to improve engagement, conversion, and overall experience quality
What you’ll bring
5-10+ years of experience, or incredible track record of high-growth, preferably at startups and on 0 → 1 products
Experience designing developer-facing products. You can translate complex, real-time AI systems and deep-tech pipelines into intuitive, high-performance solutions.
Strong visual and UX design skills, with experience applying brand across developer-facing surfaces
Comfort owning outcomes, not just outputs, thinking about design in terms of clarity, adoption, engagement, and business impact
Experience collaborating closely with product managers and engineers, and translating ambiguous ideas into crisp designs
Excellent communication skills, able to clearly articulate design decisions to technical partners
Hands-on experience with tools like Figma and modern design systems
Deep curiosity about the AI space
Founder-level proactivity: you bring solutions, not just mockups, and fix broken experience-level touchpoints before you’re asked
You use AI in your daily work, continually experimenting to improve both efficiency and quality
Show us your work
To be considered for this role, please include a link to your portfolio that demonstrates your best work in owning design across the entire user journey.
In-office location: Mountain View, California, United States. 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 base salary range for this full-time position is between $200,000 - $260,000 + bonus + equity + benefits. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your targeted location during the hiring process.
Top Skills
What We Do
Inworld is a fully integrated platform for AI characters that goes beyond large language models (LLMs) – by adding configurable safety, knowledge, memory, narrative controls, multimodality, and more.
Inworld uses advanced AI to build generative characters whose personalities, thoughts, memories, and behaviors are designed to mimic the deeply social nature of human interaction. The Inworld platform lets you create characters with personality and contextual awareness to keep them in-world and on brand. Integrations make it easy for developers to deploy characters into immersive experiences, while scale and performance are optimized for real-time experiences.
We are a team of experts that have pioneered conversational AI platforms and generative models at API.AI (acquired by Google and renamed Dialogflow), Google and DeepMind. We are continuing to build out our incredibly talented team, with experts in generative language models, emotions, speech synthesis, multimodal interaction, design, and 3D animation.
Inworld is backed by top-tier investors including Section 32, Intel Capital, BITKRAFT Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, First Spark Ventures, The Venture Reality Fund, CRV, Meta, Microsoft’s M12 fund, Micron Ventures, LG Technology Ventures, NTT Docomo Ventures, and SK Telecom Venture Capital. Inworld was one of six companies selected for the 2022 Disney Accelerator. Prominent angels include Twitch Co-Founder, Kevin Lin; Oculus Co-Founder, Nate Mitchell; Animoca Brands Co-Founder, Yat Siu; The Sandbox Co-Founder, Sebastien Borget and NaHCO3, the family office of Riot Games Co-Founder, Marc Merrill.
