Staff / Principal Platform Engineer - USA

About Inworld

Inworld is a research lab and inference provider focused on realtime AI for consumer-facing applications. We build first-party speech models, serve LLMs, and run the inference behind modular APIs designed for high-volume, realtime workloads.

Hundreds of millions of users interact with Inworld powered apps every day and we serve over 10 trillion LLM tokens per month. Our models and infrastructure support consumer applications across companions, healthcare, fitness, education, media, and more. Our work spans model research, realtime inference, large-scale serving infrastructure, and the APIs developers use to bring these capabilities into production.

We’ve raised more than $125M from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Section 32, Kleiner Perkins, Microsoft’s M12 venture fund, Founders Fund, Meta, Stanford, and others. Our technology has powered experiences from companies including NVIDIA, Microsoft Xbox, Niantic, Logitech Streamlabs, Wishroll, Little Umbrella, and Bible Chat. Inworld has also been recognized by CB Insights as one of the 100 most promising AI companies globally and named one of LinkedIn’s Top 10 Startups in the USA.

About the role

Join our team as a Staff / Principal Platform Engineer and take end-to-end ownership of building, securing, and scaling our AI products. You'll be the driving force behind our cloud infrastructure, partnering with engineers across the organization to deploy and evolve services across major cloud providers using Terraform, ArgoCD, and other tooling. In this high-impact role, you'll identify what needs to be done and move it forward, directly shaping how we operate and innovate.

What you’ll do

• Design systems for realtime, high-volume inference: plan capacity across GPU and cloud resources, build in resilience to failures, and make sure services scale smoothly as traffic grows.

• Drive engineering velocity by identifying and building AI-powered tooling and workflows that improve how our teams develop and deploy software.

• Facilitate a "you build it, you run it" culture by providing the necessary tools and processes for monitoring the reliability, availability, and performance of services.

• Manage pipelines to ensure smooth and efficient code integration and deployment.

• Conduct root cause analysis to identify critical issues and develop automated solutions to prevent recurrence.

Expected experience

• 8-10 years of experience in software engineering.

• 3+ years of experience with infrastructure-as-code.

• Proficiency in managing Kubernetes clusters and applications, including creating Kustomize manifests/Helm charts for new applications.

• Experience in creating and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for both applications and infrastructure deployments (using tools like Terraform/Terragrunt, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, Ansible, etc.).

• Deep knowledge of at least one major cloud provider (Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud).

• Proficient in at least one backend programming/scripting languages such as Golang, Python, and Bash.

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 $280,000 - $350,000. 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.

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