Staff / Principal Software Engineer - USA

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. ABOUT THE ROLE: Inworld recently launched a few exciting new products (Inworld TTS https://inworld.ai/tts, Inworld STT https://inworld.ai/speech-to-text, Speech-to-Speech / Realtime API https://inworld.ai/realtime-api and Inworld Router https://inworld.ai/router) for consumer AI applications, and we're looking for an ambitious and capable Staff/Principal Backend Engineer to join us and help take the Inworld AI platform even farther. Here is what you are going to work on: - Inworld Router: an intelligent routing layer that gives developers a single API to access 200+ LLMs. You'll own core systems for multi-provider failover, cost/latency-based routing, live A/B experimentation, and real-time observability at massive scale. - Realtime API - API-based model services: Our custom TTS/STT models and API includes free instant voice cloning. Learn more and hear examples at https://inworld.ai/ttsinworld.ai/tts http://inworld.ai/tts. Better yet, sign up yourself at https://platform.inworld.ai/platform.inworld.ai http://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. - New exciting products, ambitious and large-scale, in the lineup for the launch later this year. - Services for control and optimization. We're just getting started on these deeper capabilities. - Finally complicated and exciting Infrastructural projects: platformization of new product upcoming offering, development and integration of best development tools, projects like system-wide billing and so on. As a Staff/Principal Software 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. - Multi-provider complexity at scale. Inworld Router must intelligently route across hundreds of models and providers while handling failover, sticky sessions, cost optimization, and conditional logic, all with minimal latency overhead. You'll design systems where every millisecond and every routing decision matters. 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 tec