Staff/principal engineer

About the Role

Inworld is looking for a Staff/Principal-level backend engineer with 8+ years of experience building and operating cloud-based services at scale. The ideal candidate is a strong IC with high technical autonomy, a track record of shipping zero-to-one platform products end-to-end, and the ability to adapt across tools and programming languages. Startup or growth-stage experience is strongly preferred. AI product experience, founder experience, or experience at high-caliber AI/infrastructure companies such as Databricks is a plus.

What You'll Do

• Own core backend systems for an intelligent routing layer across 200+ LLMs with:
• Multi-provider failover
• Cost/latency-based routing
• Real-time observability at massive scale
• Build and scale API-based model services across TTS, STT, LLM, and Knowledge/RAG.
• Build infrastructure powering consumer-facing AI applications serving hundreds of millions of end users.
• Design and implement real-time, low-latency systems for speech-to-speech and Realtime API products.
• Collaborate closely with PMs, engineers, and ML teams to identify product needs and ship quickly.
• Drive system improvements and influence technical standards, dependencies, and architectural decisions.
• Work on ambitious new products and system-wide infrastructure projects.

Key Context

Pure IC role — no management responsibilities, but significant ownership expected. Flat team structure reporting to the VP of Engineering. Immediate engineering team of approximately 7–8 people. AI tools and agents are embraced throughout the development and interview process. Startup experience is strongly preferred; candidates coming exclusively from large tech companies are not a fit. Adaptability across languages and technologies is valued more than deep specialization in a single language.

Tech Stack

Go, Python, C++, Rust, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, Apache Flink, Apache Beam, ClickHouse, OpenTelemetry, GCP, AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, gRPC.

Candidate Requirements

Dealbreakers

• Built and operated cloud-based services at high scale — hundreds+ QPS.
• Hands-on experience with caching technologies such as Redis/Memcached, pub/sub or queues, and data pipelines such as Flink or Beam.
• Baseline 8+ years of backend software engineering experience.
• At least one startup or growth-stage company in their background; not exclusively big tech.
• Has shipped zero-to-one platform or product builds end-to-end.
• Technical degree in CS, physics, math, engineering, or a similar STEM field.
• Strong cloud infrastructure experience across GCP, AWS, or Azure.
• Experience operating relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL at scale.

Nice to Have

• Experience building AI products or real-time consumer-facing systems.
• Experience building API gateways, routing/proxy layers, or multi-provider orchestration systems.
• AI product, founder, or high-caliber AI/infrastructure startup experience.