Staff / Principal Software Engineer - USA

On-site$280,000 – $350,000
United States

Tech Stack

PythonRustC++APIAnalyticsOpenTelemetryGoogle Cloud Storage

Job Description, Responsibilities & Requirements

About the Position

Staff / Principal Software Engineer - USA

Mountain View, California, USA


About Inworld

Inworld is a research lab of top researchers and engineers, building the world’s top-ranked realtime voice models. Our models are the #1 ranked realtime voice models in the world, powering the largest consumer-facing AI applications across various categories. We've raised more than $125M from top-tier investors and have been recognized by CB Insights and LinkedIn.


About the Role

Inworld recently launched exciting new products (Inworld TTS, Inworld STT, Speech-to-Speech / Realtime API, and Inworld Router) for consumer AI applications. We're looking for an ambitious and capable Staff/Principal Backend Engineer to join us and help take the Inworld AI platform even farther.

Responsibilities

  • Inworld Router: Develop an intelligent routing layer that provides developers with 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: Develop custom TTS/STT models and API, including free instant voice cloning. Learn more and hear examples at inworld.ai/tts.
  • New exciting products: Work on ambitious and large-scale products launching later this year.
  • Control and optimization services: Develop deeper capabilities for control and optimization.
  • Infrastructural projects: Platformization of new product offerings, development and integration of best development tools, system-wide billing, and more.

Key Challenges

  • 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.
  • 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.

Requirements

Must Haves

  • Excellent programming skills and experience in a statically typed backend programming language, preferably Go, Python, C++, or Rust.
  • Experience developing and deploying cloud-based services to at least hundreds of qps (preferably more).
  • Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL or MySQL).
  • Hands-on experience with caching (Redis or Memcached), pubsub/queues, data pipelines (Flink, Beam), and Cloud storage.
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills, can collaborate and coordinate with other roles and engineers with ease, trusted and well-regarded teammate.

Bonus Qualifications

  • Experience building API gateways, routing/proxy layers, or multi-provider orchestration systems.
  • Experience with analytics or timeseries databases (ClickHouse, Timescale, InfluxDB).
  • Experience with OpenTelemetry.
  • Experience with C++.

We Offer

  • Base Salary: $280,000 - $350,000 USD per year.
  • Equity: In addition to base pay, total compensation includes equity and benefits.
  • Location: 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).

About the Company

Inworld is a research lab of top researchers and engineers, building the world’s top-ranked realtime voice models. Our models are the #1 ranked realtime voice models in the world, powering the largest consumer-facing AI applications across various categories. We've raised more than $125M from top-tier investors and have been recognized by CB Insights and LinkedIn.


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Job Details

Company name:
Inworld AI
Salary:
$280,000 – $350,000
Location:
United States
Employment Type:
Full-time
Work Mode:
On-site
Posted on TheJob:
4/11/2026
Last checked:
6/12/2026
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