Germany Senior / Lead Research Scientist - Germany

Inworld AI; Deutschland; On-site; USD 136,550 - 204,825; Full time

Job summary

Inworld AI is seeking a Senior / Lead Research Scientist in Germany to lead research on real-time voice models and agentic systems. You will drive end-to-end research from concept to publication, shaping the world’s top realtime voice technologies.

We value evidence of impact through building, experiments, and collaborations; relocate if needed, and contribute to a fast, experimental culture with clear ownership and rapid iteration.

Qualifications

• Foundation models: training, new architectures, RL, reward modeling, scaling.
• Evaluation: benchmarks, eval loops, quality measurement, LLM-as-judge, failure analysis.
• Frontier topics: multimodal models, agents, tool use, test-time compute, world models.
• Published research: ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, EMNLP, ACL, or AAAI.
• Public work: non-trivial AI side projects, interdisciplinary experiments, open-source contributions.
• Full-stack research ownership: you frame the question, run the experiments, write the paper, ship the result.

Education

PhD in ML/NLP — or equivalent practical experience

Job description

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About Inworld

Inworld is a research lab of top researchers and engineers, building the world’s top-ranked realtime voice models.

Today our models are the #1 ranked realtime voice models in the world. They are used to power the largest consumer-facing AI applications available, across categories like health, fitness, learning, therapy, companions, customer experience and media; representing 100s of millions of end users. Our work spans areas like research and development of state-of-the-art models, optimizing realtime inference, and creating best-in-class APIs and products that allow developers to engage their users.

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

Who We're Looking For

A year ago, reliably working agentic systems barely existed. Nobody has a decade of experience here. So we're not screening for a resume template — we're looking for strong people from varied backgrounds who learn fast, thrive in ambiguity, and can show us what theyve built, broken, and understood.

Experience We Find Useful

You don't need all of this. But you need enough to make a case.

• Foundation models: training, new architectures, RL, reward modeling, scaling

• Evaluation: benchmarks, eval loops, quality measurement, LLM-as-judge, failure analysis

• Frontier topics: multimodal models, agents, tool use, test-time compute, world models

• Published research at ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, EMNLP, ACL, or AAAI

• PhD in ML/NLP — or equivalent practical experience you can point to

• Public work: non-trivial AI side projects, interdisciplinary experiments, open-source contributions

• Full-stack research ownership: you frame the question, run the experiments, write the paper, ship the result

If you learned through building, competitions, or collaborations outside academia — that counts. We care about evidence, not credentials.

Who Thrives Here

• Pathfinders: You don’t need a roadmap to start walking; you’re comfortable picking a direction and building the map as you go.

• Full-Cycle Researchers: You believe research isn\u2019t finished until it’s shipped. You have a bias for impact over purely academic output.

• First-Principles Engineers: You don't just ship code; you obsess over the why. You’re the first to question an approach if you think there’s a better way to solve the core problem.

• Mission Owners: You aren't satisfied with "the PM said so." You thrive on deep context and want to understand the fundamental logic behind every decision we make.

What Working Here Is Like

We hand you unclear problems and expect you to make them clear. We value researchers who say "I don't know yet" — and then design the experiment that finds out. We treat evaluation as a first-class research product, not a box to check before launch. Impact comes before publications though we support sharing work that moves the field forward. Your work should be visible. Flat structure, fast iterations, minimal process theater.

We don't need a cover letter. A link to something you've built tells us more.

Professional fluency in English (written and spoken) is required, as you will be collaborating daily with our US-based leadership and engineering teams.

For candidates interested in relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area in the future, full U.S. visa and relocation support may be available, subject to business needs and applicable legal and work authorization requirements.

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