Staff Backend Engineer

About Inworld

At Inworld, we believe the processes of building, scaling, and evolving applications are monsters that consume value before it can reach users. Our mission is to solve evolution and transform static software into AI systems that autonomously evolve to better serve their users. We are building an intelligent runtime to conquer these monsters and make this vision a reality.

We are backed by investors such as Lightspeed, Section 32, Kleiner Perkins, Microsoft’s M12 venture fund, BITKRAFT, Founders Fund, and First Spark Ventures. Our technology is used by category leaders, including NVIDIA, Microsoft Xbox, Niantic, Wishroll, Little Umbrella and Streamlabs, among many others. Inworld has been recognized by CB Insights as one of the 100 most promising AI companies globally and has been named one of LinkedIn's Top 10 Startups in the USA

About the role

Inworld is evolving, and we’re looking for an ambitious and capable Staff Backend Engineer to join us to help drive and actualize this evolution.

To understand what’s changing, please read our recent blog post, A Return to the User . In short, a new platform is emerging right now at Inworld to better serve how AI software really scales and evolves. It consists of a few key pillars:

• The core is the intelligent runtime . This has not been fully announced yet, but suffice to say, as a runtime, it primarily runs local to the experiences our customers are building.

• API-based model services : These are not fully announced either, but on June 25 we did announce our new TTS service and models, which includes free instant voice cloning. Check out more and hear examples at inworld.ai/tts . Better yet, sign up yourself at platform.inworld.ai/ , try out the premade voices, or clone your own voice in just a few seconds, and let us know what you think!

• Data ingestion : The goal isn’t just low-level data. As the blog post explains, data ingestion aims to understand users and their context in order to provide the best user experiences

• Finally, services for control and optimization , as sketched out in the blog post.

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you would be a significant part of one or more of these areas. The key challenges are:

• Shipping quickly . AI is an intensively competitive area, and we don’t have the luxury of moving slowly.

• Zero to one . The platform is not a simple copycat.

• Realtime, online . That is the asymptote. It is not easy to do well, which is part of the fun.

Given that this vision was recently announced (June 2025), we are still in an intense building phase. Right now:

• Some of these components exist as early versions (functional, but with plenty of room to go deeper)

• Others are still to be built. We are launching something new pretty much every month.

Finally, almost everything here is a collaboration with our sibling ML teams, since ML and AI are critical to providing the learning and adaptability central to this vision.

Please note: This is an IC-focused role. We are looking for someone who loves direct technical contribution alongside very capable peers.

What you’ll do

• Establish significant scope : Collaborate with the PMs, engineers and leads to determine the biggest product needs to focus on now.

• Operate with technical autonomy : You have considerable leeway to suggest how to address a given focus area, including bringing in new technical dependencies or standards where it’s the best choice.

• Collaborate, execute, deliver : This is the core of the building loop. We aim to optimize for both speed and quality, despite it being decidedly non-obvious how to manage that tradeoff exceptionally well.

• Reflect and drive improvements: Especially as a Staff Engineer, advocate for and realize system improvements, both related to and independent of key features.

Expected experience

• Excellent programming skills and experience in a statically typed backend programming language, preferably Go, Kotlin, Java 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), Queues/Pubsub/Messaging, data pipelines (Flink, Beam), and Cloud storage

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, can collaborate and coordinate with other roles and engineer with ease, trusted and well-regarded teammate

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with analytics or timeseries databases (ClickHouse, Timescale, InfluxDB)

• Experience with OpenTelemetry (both using, and implementing support for)

• Experience with C++

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 US base salary range for this full-time position is $180,000 - $280,000. In addition to base pay, total compensation includes equity and benefits. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location, level, and additional factors, including competencies, experience, and business needs. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future.