Staff / Principal Software Engineer

You'll join a fast-moving platform team building the systems behind Inworld's newest products, including Inworld Router, an intelligent routing layer that gives developers a single API to access 200+ LLMs. You'll own core systems for multi-provider failover, cost/latency-based routing, live A/B experimentation, and real-time observability at massive scale. You'll also work on the Realtime API, API-based model services like custom TTS/STT with instant voice cloning, and new large-scale products launching later this year. You'll help build services for control and optimization, and tackle infrastructural projects like platformization of upcoming product offerings, development tooling, and system-wide billing. As a Staff/Principal Engineer, you'll establish significant scope by collaborating with PMs, engineers, and leads to determine what to focus on, operate with technical autonomy to decide how to address problems, collaborate and deliver on the core building loop, and reflect on and drive system improvements. This is an IC-focused role for someone who loves direct technical contribution alongside capable peers.

Responsibilities

• Own core systems for multi-provider failover, cost/latency-based routing, live A/B experimentation, and real-time observability at massive scale
• Design systems where every millisecond and every routing decision matters
• Collaborate with PMs, engineers and leads to determine the biggest product needs to focus on
• Operate with technical autonomy to address focus areas, including bringing in new technical dependencies or standards
• Collaborate, execute, and deliver on features balancing speed and quality
• Advocate for and realize system improvements related to and independent of key features
• Work on control and optimization services
• Contribute to infrastructural projects such as platformization of new products and system-wide billing

Requirements

• Excellent programming skills and experience in a statically typed backend programming language, preferably Go, Python, C++ or Rust
• Experience developing and deploying cloud-based services to at least hundreds of qps
• Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL or MySQL)
• Hands-on experience with caching (Redis or Memcached), pubsub/queues, data pipelines (Flink, Beam), and Cloud storage
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Experience building API gateways, routing/proxy layers, or multi-provider orchestration systems (bonus)
• Experience with analytics or timeseries databases (ClickHouse, Timescale, InfluxDB) (bonus)
• Experience with OpenTelemetry (bonus)
• Experience with C++ (bonus)

Benefits

• equity