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StaffPrincipal Engineer
Job Location:
Monthly Salary:
Posted:
4 September 2026 (Yesterday)
Posted:
Application Deadline:
2 December 2026
Application Deadline:
Vacancies:
1 Vacancy
Vacancies:
Job Summary
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 Youll Do
- Own core backend systems foran 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 theVP of Engineering.
- Immediate engineering team of approximately 78 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Required Experience:
Staff IC
