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Engineering Full-Time
Inworld

Staff / Principal Research Scientist (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 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.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I apply for the Staff / Principal Research Scientist (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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