About the Position

Staff / Principal Research Scientist - USA

Mountain View, California, USA

About Inworld

Inworld is a research lab and inference provider focused on real-time AI for consumer-facing applications. We build first-party speech models, serve LLMs, and run the inference behind modular APIs designed for high-volume, real-time workloads.

Hundreds of millions of users interact with Inworld-powered apps every day and we serve over 10 trillion LLM tokens per month. Our models and infrastructure support consumer applications across companions, healthcare, fitness, education, media, and more. Our work spans model research, real-time inference, large-scale serving infrastructure, and the APIs developers use to bring these capabilities into production.

We’ve raised more than $125M from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Section 32, Kleiner Perkins, Microsoft’s M12 venture fund, Founders Fund, Meta, Stanford, and others. Our technology has powered experiences from companies including NVIDIA, Microsoft Xbox, Niantic, Logitech Streamlabs, Wishroll, Little Umbrella, and Bible Chat. Inworld has also been recognized by CB Insights as one of the 100 most promising AI companies globally and named one of LinkedIn’s Top 10 Startups in the USA.

Who We're Looking For

A year ago, reliably working agentic systems barely existed. Nobody has a decade of experience here. So we're not screening for a resume template - we're looking for strong people from varied backgrounds who learn fast, thrive in ambiguity, and can show us what they've built, broken, and understood.

Experience We Find Useful

You don't need all of this. But you need enough to make a case.

Foundation models: training, new architectures, RL, reward modeling, scaling
Evaluation: benchmarks, eval loops, quality measurement, LLM-as-judge, failure analysis
Frontier topics: multimodal models, agents, tool use, test-time compute, world models
Published research at ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, EMNLP, ACL, or AAAI
PhD in ML/NLP - or equivalent practical experience you can point to
Public work: non-trivial AI side projects, interdisciplinary experiments, open-source contributions
Full-stack research ownership: you frame the question, run the experiments, write the paper, ship the result

If you learned through building, competitions, or collaborations outside academia, that counts. We care about evidence, not credentials.

Who Thrives Here

You don’t need a roadmap to start walking; you’re comfortable picking a direction and building the map as you go
You believe research isn't finished until it’s shipped. You have a bias for impact over purely academic output
You don't just ship code; you obsess over the why. You’re the first to question an approach if you think there’s a better way to solve the core problem
You aren't satisfied with "the PM said so." You thrive on deep context and want to understand the fundamental logic behind every decision we make

What Working Here Is Like

We hand you unclear problems and expect you to make them clear. We value researchers who say "I don't know yet" and then design the experiment that finds out. We treat evaluation as a first-class research product, not a box to check before launch. Impact comes before publications though we support sharing work that moves the field forward. Your work should be visible. Flat structure, fast iterations, minimal process theater.

We believe in the power of in-person collaboration to solve the hardest problems and foster a strong team culture. We offer relocation assistance and look forward to you joining us in our Mountain View office.

We Offer

The base salary range for this full-time position is $270,000+ with a bonus, equity, and benefits.

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Staff / Principal Research Scientist - USA

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