Staff / Principal Research Scientist

Inworld AI; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 270,000 - 500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Equity

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

A leading AI research lab in Mountain View is seeking innovative candidates who thrive in uncertainty and possess strong technical backgrounds, particularly in machine learning and natural language processing. Applicants should demonstrate experience with foundational AI models and published research. The role offers a base salary of $270,000 - $500,000, along with bonuses and equity, emphasizing impactful research in a collaborative environment.

Qualifications

• Comfortable picking a direction and building the map.
• Belief that research isn't finished until it’s shipped.
• Obsession over the reasoning behind approaches.

Responsibilities

• Handle unclear problems and clarify them.
• Design experiments to find solutions.
• Work collaboratively in a fast-paced environment.

Skills

Foundation models

Evaluation

Frontier topics

Published research

PhD in ML/NLP

Public work

Full-stack research ownership

Education

PhD in ML/NLP or equivalent practical experience

Job description

Inworld is a product-oriented research lab of top AI researchers and engineers, developing best-in-class realtime multimodal models and the only realtime orchestration platform optimized for thousands of queries per second.

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 they've 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

• You don’t need a roadmap to start walking; you’re comfortable picking a direction and building the map as you go
• You believe research isn't finished until it’s shipped. You have a bias for impact over purely academic output
• 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
• 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 believe in the power of in-person collaboration to solve the hardest problems and foster a strong team culture. We offer relocation assistance and look forward to you joining us in our Mountain View office.

The base salary range for this full-time position is $270,000 - $500,000+ bonus + equity + benefits.