Staff / Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Serving
About this role
Who We're Looking For
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.
Company at a glance
Inworld is an AI company providing real-time models for developers to build multimodal AI companions and agents at consumer scale, with adoption from NVIDIA, Microsoft Xbox, and Logitech Streamlabs.
What happens next
Skip the application pile. I get you in front of the people who decide.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
When the company wants to meet, I get the call on your calendar. You just show up.
Know someone who'd be great for this?




