Applied AI Engineer

Inworld AI; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus

Equity

Benefits

Job summary

Inworld AI is seeking a founding Solutions Engineer to become the technical backbone of the revenue team. You will work closely with senior leadership and the GTM team to turn potential customers into satisfied clients, running POCs and building prototypes to facilitate smooth integrations.

Ideal candidates have 5+ years in a technical customer-facing role and are knowledgeable about AI/ML APIs. The position offers a full-time salary range of $170,000 to $250,000 plus bonus and equity.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in a customer-facing technical role.
• Deep familiarity with AI/ML APIs.
• Effective communication bridging technical and business.

Responsibilities

• Partner with GTM Leads on deals.
• Build prototypes demonstrating Inworld’s solutions.
• Serve as the primary technical advisor during onboarding.

Skills

Technical Communication

Customer Interaction

AI/ML APIs

Prototyping

Education

Bachelor’s degree or higher in a technical domain

Tools

WebSocket

WebRTC

Job description

Your Impact

We're looking for a founding Solutions Engineer who will sit at the intersection of sales, product, and engineering — and become the technical backbone of our revenue team. You'll work directly with the senior leadership and our GTM team to help enterprise and developer customers go from “this sounds interesting” to “this is in production.”

You’ll run POCs, build prototypes, and translate complex technical questions into clear answers for both engineers and executives. You’ll own the technical side of deals pre‑ and post‑signature — ensuring customers are genuinely successful, not just signed. Your work will directly shape how Inworld scales across gaming, CCaaS, media, consumer AI and beyond, and your fingerprints will be on the SE function as we build it.

What You’ll Do

• Partner with GTM Leads on deals — lead technical discovery, run POCs, and own the solution design from first call through close
• Build working prototypes and reference integrations that demonstrate Inworld’s TTS, STT, LLM Router, LLM inference, and Realtime API solutions in the customer’s actual context — not just a demo environment
• Serve as the primary technical advisor during onboarding, getting customers from signed contract to production-quality integration
• Translate customer requirements into actionable feedback for Product and Engineering
• Answer deep technical questions live — latency tradeoffs, on‑prem vs. cloud deployment, streaming architecture, model selection — without needing backup
• Build and maintain a library of integration examples, demo environments, and technical collateral that the whole GTM team can use
• Identify expansion opportunities by understanding what customers are building and where Inworld can do more
• Contribute to shaping our technical sales process as an early hire — you’ll define what great looks like here
• Work closely with GTM leadership to redefine modern GTM and sales process

What You’ll Bring

• 5+ years of experience in a customer‑facing technical role (Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Solutions Architect, or Technical Account Manager)
• Deep familiarity with AI/ML APIs — you understand how to work with LLMs, speech models, and streaming APIs, and can explain tradeoffs to both engineers and executives
• Demonstrated ability to run technical POCs end‑to‑end and drive them to a decision
• Effective communicator who can bridge technical and business conversations with ease
• High level of empathy and integrity in customer interactions
• Thrives in ambiguity and sees constant change as opportunity, not obstacle
• Bachelor’s degree or higher in a technical domain

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with voice AI, TTS, STT, or real‑time audio and speech systems
• Background in gaming, CCaaS, or media and entertainment — our top customer verticals
• Familiarity with on‑premise and edge deployment patterns (containerization, model serving, quantization)
• Experience with WebSocket/WebRTC or real‑time streaming infrastructure
• Prior experience at a high‑growth startup or as a founder/operator
• Experience with modern GTM tooling (Clay, n8n, Zapier, etc.)

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 base salary range for this full‑time position is $170,000 - $250,000+ bonus + equity + benefits.