Staff / Principal Research Scientist - Switzerland

About the Position

Staff / Principal Research Scientist - Switzerland

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.

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.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with top researchers to develop state-of-the-art realtime voice models
• Design and optimize realtime inference models
• Create best-in-class APIs and products for developers

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 We're Looking For

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. You don’t need all of the above. But you need enough to make a case.

Who Thrives Here

• 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 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 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 Offer

• Opportunity to work with the world’s top-ranked realtime voice models
• Collaborative environment with top researchers and engineers
• Potential for U.S. visa and relocation support in the future

About the Company

Inworld is a research lab of top researchers and engineers, building the world’s top-ranked realtime voice models. 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.