Staff / Principal Research Scientist

Inworld AI is a research lab and inference provider for realtime AI at consumer scale. It provides text-to-speech, speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, and LLM routing products for developers and businesses building consumer-facing applications.

Seed6 current maintainers5 lead step-downsTeam intelligence

Maintainer signals as of 9/25/2026

Distributed
About Inworld AI

Inworld AI develops and operates realtime AI infrastructure, including first-party text-to-speech and speech-to-text models, a customizable speech-to-speech Realtime API, and an LLM Router that routes requests across leading model providers. Its platform supports voice agents, social and companion applications, learning and education, health and wellness, agentic workforce applications, and games and media. The company serves developers, businesses, and teams building consumer-facing applications.

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Skills

Candidate Availability

Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.

About the Role

You'll dive into unclear, ambiguous problems and make them clear, framing the right questions and designing experiments to find answers. You'll work on foundation models, evaluation systems, and frontier topics like multimodal models, agents, tool use, and world models. You'll treat evaluation as a first-class research product rather than a checkbox, and you'll own your research end-to-end—from framing the question, to running experiments, to writing up and shipping the result. You'll collaborate in person with a flat, fast-moving team, question existing approaches when you see a better path, and prioritize impact over purely academic output, while still being supported in sharing work that advances the field.

Requirements

  • Experience with foundation models, including training, new architectures, reinforcement learning, reward modeling, and scaling
  • Experience with evaluation, including benchmarks, evaluation loops, quality measurement, LLM-as-judge, and failure analysis
  • Experience with frontier topics including multimodal models, agents, tool use, test-time compute, and world models
  • Published research at ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, EMNLP, ACL, or AAAI
  • PhD in ML/NLP or equivalent practical experience
  • Public work such as non-trivial AI side projects, interdisciplinary experiments, or open-source contributions
  • Full-stack research ownership from framing questions to shipping results

Responsibilities

  • Frame research questions and design experiments
  • Run experiments and analyze results
  • Write up and ship research results
  • Build and improve foundation models including training, architectures, reinforcement learning, reward modeling, and scaling
  • Design evaluation benchmarks, evaluation loops, and quality measurement systems
  • Perform failure analysis on models and systems
  • Work on frontier topics such as multimodal models, agents, tool use, test-time compute, and world models

Benefits

  • Relocation assistance
  • Equity
  • Bonus