Staff / Principal Machine Learning Engineer - 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.

About the role

Our intelligent runtime must seamlessly connect to foundational models - whether via APIs or running locally - and autonomously evolve an application's logic. For this to be possible at scale, not only the runtime has to be reliable and flexible, but the models it uses need to be state-of-the-art quality, exceptionally fast, and cost-effective.

We are seeking Staff and Principal level Machine Learning Engineers to solve these critical challenges. You will be responsible for researching, building, optimizing, and deploying the production ML systems that power our platform. Your work will focus on the difficult research and engineering problems of building the engine for the next generation of AI-driven software.

Responsibilities

• Experiment with and implement cutting-edge ML models and techniques to advance our core AI capabilities.
• Train, evaluate, and optimize production-scale models and systems, focusing on quality, latency, cost, and on-device constraints.
• Collaborate with product and backend teams to translate novel ideas and research findings into robust, production-ready solutions.

Qualifications

• A PhD in a relevant technical field, or a BA/BS degree with equivalent research and/or engineering experience.
• 5+ years of combined experience in software development (Python, C++) and applied ML engineering.
• Demonstrated experience applying or researching ML in domains such as natural language processing, speech processing, and/or action planning.
• Strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and neural network architectures.
• Proficiency with ML frameworks such as PyTorch.

A good fit for this role may have

• A passion for learning and staying up-to-date with the latest advancements in ML research and its applications.
• Ability to work collaboratively in a fast-paced environment with shifting priorities.
• Familiarity with pre-training, fine-tuning, RLHF and evaluation of large language and speech models.
• Knowledge of working with embedded systems and/or running ML on edge devices.
• Strong background in mathematics and/or physics.

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.

The base salary range for this full-time position is $240,000 - $385,000+ bonus + equity + benefits.