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Engineering Full-Time
Inworld

Staff / Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Inference (US)

Inworld • South Bay Area

Company

Inworld

Annual salary

$270k – $500k/yr

Location

South Bay Area

Listed

73d ago

Experience:
6 to 20 years
Workplace:
This role can either be onsite in Mountain View, CA, or remote for candidates in the US, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom, or Serbia, strong preference for Bay Area candidates who can work on-site in Mountain View, CA
Visa:
Visa sponsorship available
Equity:
Competitive equity

Remote (listed in South Bay Area). Visa sponsorship available.

Send us your LinkedIn and CV. If your experience fits, we'll introduce you to the recruiter filling this role.

Apply for a referral →

The recruiter emails you before anything happens and may suggest other jobs that suit you better.

What you need

  • A year ago, reliably working agentic systems and sub-second multimodal inference at scale 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.

  • Inference Optimization. Deep understanding of modern serving frameworks and techniques like vLLM or TRT-LLM.

  • Model Acceleration. Hands-on experience with quantization, distillation, caching strategies, continuous batching, paged attention, and speculative decoding.

  • High-Performance Systems. Proficiency in C++, CUDA, Rust, or highly optimized Python. You know how to profile code and squeeze every ounce of performance out of NVIDIA GPUs.

  • Distributed Systems & Scaling. Experience with Kubernetes, Ray, custom load balancing, multi-GPU/multi-node inference, and reliably handling thousands of concurrent connections.

  • **Public work. **Non-trivial systems programming projects, open-source contributions to major inference engines, or deep-dive technical write-ups.

  • Full-cycle ownership. You can take a model from the research team, containerize it, optimize its serving, and ensure it runs reliably in production.

  • Background. PhD in CS, Physics, Math, or equivalent practical experience building backend or ML systems.

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 engineering isn't finished until it’s shipped and stable. You have a bias for impact over purely theoretical optimizations.

  • You don't just ship code; you obsess over the why. You’re the first to question an architecture if you think there’s a better way to solve the core latency or throughput 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.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I apply for the Staff / Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Inference (US) role at Inworld? +

Use the Apply for a referral button on this page to send us your LinkedIn and CV. If your experience fits, we'll introduce you to the recruiter filling this role. They'll email you to check you're interested, then put you forward for this job or others that suit you better. It's free.

What does this Inworld role pay? +

The listing gives $270k – $500k/yr.

Is this role remote? +

Yes, the listing is remote. This role can either be onsite in Mountain View, CA, or remote for candidates in the US, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom, or Serbia, strong preference for Bay Area candidates who can work on-site in Mountain View, CA. Visa sponsorship available.

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