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.