Staff / Principal Research Scientist - Switzerland

About the Position

Staff / Principal Research Scientist - Switzerland

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.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with a leading AI research lab focused on real-time AI applications.
• Develop and improve foundation models, evaluation methods, and frontier topics in AI.
• Conduct research and publish findings in top-tier conferences.
• Contribute to public work and open-source projects.
• Frame research questions, run experiments, and ship results.

Requirements

• 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
• Professional fluency in English (written and spoken) is required

Who Thrives Here

• Comfortable picking a direction and building the map as you go
• Believe research isn't finished until it’s shipped
• Obsess over the why and question approaches for better solutions
• Thrive on deep context and understanding the fundamental logic behind decisions

What Working Here Is Like

• Work on unclear problems and make them clear
• Design experiments to find answers
• Treat evaluation as a first-class research product
• Impact comes before publications, though sharing work is supported
• Flat structure, fast iterations, minimal process theater

Location & Employment

• Location: Remote within Switzerland
• Employment type: Full-time, permanent employment
• Hiring model: Employment via Employer of Record (EOR)

Candidates must already have the legal right to work in Switzerland, as visa sponsorship is not available for this role. For candidates interested in relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area in the future, full U.S. visa and relocation support may be available, subject to business needs and applicable legal and work authorization requirements.

About the Company

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.