Staff / Principal Research Scientist - USA

Staff / Principal Research Scientist - USA

Mountain View, California, USA

What you'll do

We’re seeking a Staff / Principal Research Scientist to advance Inworld’s research initiatives in realtime multimodal models and scalable orchestration. You’ll frame ambitious questions, design and run experiments, write papers, and ship results that move the field forward. You will own full-stack research—from problem framing to publication and product impact—while collaborating with a fast-moving, mission-driven team.

Who you are

• You thrive in ambiguity, move fast, and enjoy building a map as you go.
• You believe research should be shipped with impact, not just published.
• You obsess over the underlying reasons behind approaches and are willing to challenge decisions when necessary.
• You seek deep context to understand core problems and prefer evidence over credentials.

Experience we find useful

• 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
• Public work: non-trivial AI side projects, interdisciplinary experiments, open-source contributions
• Full-stack research ownership: frame the question, run experiments, write the paper, ship the result

What you'll do (detailed)

• Identify high-impact research directions for realtime multimodal systems and tool-use-enabled agents
• Design and run rigorous experimentation, evaluation, and ablation studies
• Collaborate with engineering teams to translate research into production-ready components
• Publish findings in conferences and internal reports; contribute to open research discussions as appropriate

Benefits & incentives

• Competitive base salary ($270,000 - $500,000+), bonus, equity, and benefits
• Relocation assistance
• Flat organizational structure with fast iterations

Location & team

Mountain View office with in-person collaboration emphasis