Staff Backend Engineer - USA

Why Join Inworld

Inworld is the leading provider of AI technology for real-time interactive experiences, with a $500 million valuation and backing from top tier investors including Intel Capital, Microsoft’s M12 fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Section 32, BITKRAFT Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, and First Spark Ventures.

Inworld provides the market’s best framework for building production ready interactive experiences, coupled with dedicated services to optimize specific stages of development – from design and development, to ML pipeline optimization and custom compute infrastructure. We help developers bring their AI engines in-house with a framework optimized for real-time data ingestion, low latency, and massive scale. Inworld powers experiences built by Ubisoft, NVIDIA, Niantic, NetEase Games and LG, among others, and has partnerships with key industry players such as Microsoft Xbox, Epic Games, and Unity.

Inworld was recognized by CB Insights as one of the 100 most promising AI companies in the world in 2024 and was named among LinkedIn's Top Startups of 2024 in the USA.

About the role

At Inworld backend engineering, our philosophy is to enthusiastically pursue both speed and quality. As a startup, speed is a first principle. That said, quality is what makes our products great and our system enjoyable to work on, so we continuously improve to push the frontier on both.

As a Staff Backend Engineer at Inworld AI, you will pursue both speed and quality as you contribute myriad ideas, features and improvements to the system and services for our external product offerings.

This is an IC-focused role. We are looking for someone who loves direct technical contribution.

What you’ll do

• Collaborate with Product Managers, ML Engineers, QA and more to identify, refine, and prioritize the most impactful projects we can pursue.


• Design, develop, test, and launch services, features and improvements.


• Add logging, monitoring, dashboards, alerts, docs and runbooks, so that the team can understand, operate, debug, and evolve the entire system with confidence.


• Be involved with scaling our services to handle increasing customer usage.

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.