Design Engineer Lead - USA

About Inworld

At Inworld, we believe that the benefits of AI should extend beyond business workflows to the applications and experiences that we enjoy every day. We began by pushing the frontier of lifelike, interactive characters for games and entertainment, pioneering realtime conversational AI at scale. Today, we apply that expertise to provide the multimodal models, pipelines and tools needed to build and evolve consumer-scale, real-time conversational AI applications across learning, health, social, assistants, games and media.

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.

Your Impact

We're looking for a highly skilled Design Engineer Lead to join our team in the Bay Area. You will work closely with our Product and Engineering teams to shape the end-to-end user experience, crafting intuitive, polished interactions that delight our developer customer base. The ideal candidate is equally comfortable translating ideas into prototypes and production-ready designs as they are implementing them in code to bring that vision to life. Your work will directly influence how users experience our technology, defining new design patterns for cutting-edge AI solutions and helping make advanced capabilities feel accessible and intuitive.

What You'll Do

• Lead the design process from concept to final product. This includes creating user flows, wireframes, and interactive prototypes.
• Implement your designs in code (React, TypeScript, etc.), ensuring that what you ship matches the vision with polish and precision.
• Collaborate closely with Product and Engineering to translate complex AI capabilities into intuitive, developer-friendly experiences.
• Continuously test, learn, and iterate, using feedback and data to refine and improve the user experience.
• Champion design quality and user empathy, shaping both the product and the way we build it.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in product design, user experience (UX) design, and front-end engineering.
• A portfolio showcasing strong design principles and a deep understanding of user-centered design.
• Proficiency in Figma and modern design workflows.
• Fluent in modern front-end tech, including JavaScript, TypeScript, and React.
• Experience with popular frontend tools and libraries (MUI, Emotion, Next.js, and Tailwind, etc).
• Clear communicator who enjoys working across design, product, and engineering.
• Thrive when tackling different projects at once in a dynamic setting.

In-office location: Mountain View, California, United States. 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).

The base salary range for this full-time position is between $180,000 - $260,000 + bonus + equity + benefits.