Staff Designer, Inworld AI
USA
$200-260k
+ Bonus + Equity
3+ days a week in office (Mountain View, CA)
AI-powered characters for virtual environments
Open for applications
AI-powered characters for virtual environments
101-200 employees
Open for applications
$200-260k
+ Bonus + Equity
3+ days a week in office (Mountain View, CA)
101-200 employees
Company mission
To transform static software into living AI systems that autonomously evolve to better serve their users.
Role
Who you are
- This role is ideal for a designer with high agency who is comfortable operating with minimal oversight, proactively identifying problems, driving solutions forward, and who brings perspective on AI-native experiences design
- 5-10+ years of experience, or incredible track record of high-growth, preferably at startups and on 0 → 1 products
- Experience designing developer-facing products. You can translate complex, real-time AI systems and deep-tech pipelines into intuitive, high-performance solutions
- Strong visual and UX design skills, with experience applying brand across developer-facing surfaces
- Comfort owning outcomes, not just outputs, thinking about design in terms of clarity, adoption, engagement, and business impact
- Experience collaborating closely with product managers and engineers, and translating ambiguous ideas into crisp designs
- Excellent communication skills, able to clearly articulate design decisions to technical partners
- Hands-on experience with tools like Figma and modern design systems
- Deep curiosity about the AI space
- Founder-level proactivity: you bring solutions, not just mockups, and fix broken experience-level touchpoints before you’re asked
- You use AI in your daily work, continually experimenting to improve both efficiency and quality
What the job involves
- We’re looking for a Staff Designer who will define and elevate the visual and UX quality across every external surface at Inworld
- This is a highly visible, cross-functional role for a designer who excels operating horizontally across product, brand, and growth
- This role is both strategic and hands-on: you’ll define standards, influence direction, and personally raise the design level across everything we ship
- Own the visual design and UX across all external surfaces from concept through execution
- Lead the design of intuitive experiences for state-of-the-art generative AI systems
- Provide horizontal design leadership across product, marketing, and growth experiences
- Lead and manage relationships with external agencies and vendors, setting clear direction and ensuring work meets Inworld’s quality bar
- Establish and evolve design standards and guidelines that enable speed without sacrificing quality
- Think about design as a growth lever, using insights, data, and experimentation to improve engagement, conversion, and overall experience quality
Application process
- To be considered for this role, please include a link to your portfolio that demonstrates your best work in owning design across the entire user journey
Our take
Dialogue writing for video games has traditionally been a matter of branching conversations based on player input, but this is a time-consuming and complicated process. In modern virtual environments which can contain thousands of characters, the need to save on costs means that conversations with many characters can be shallow and repetitive. Inworld AI's solution allows for the creation of unique and flexible interactions for even the most minor characters, based on just a few descriptive sentences.
Since launching, Inworld has quickly grown from an AI-character startup into one of the key players powering consumer AI. Its early work with companies like Xbox, Disney, and NBCUniversal helped provide the value of real-time AI experiences, and now a wide range of media companies, game studios, and fast-growing startups are building on its platform.
Now, with the recent release of Inworld Runtime, the company is taking an even bigger step. By opening up the internal system they originally built to handle huge, real-time consumer workloads, Inworld is positioning Runtime as the go-to backend for any team looking to scale from an idea to millions of users. Its adaptive graphs, automated MLOps, and one-click experiments remove most of the painful engineering work that usually slows teams now. And for Inworld, this turns Runtime into more than just a product, it becomes the core of the company's future.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Aug 2023
$50m
SERIES A
Aug 2022
$50m
SERIES A
Total funding: $117m
Company HQ
Mountain View, CA
Leadership
Ilya Gelfenbeyn
(Co-Founder & Executive Chairman)Previously co-founded API.AI (now known as Google Dialogflow), a developer platform for building conversational experiences, and served as its CEO before Google acquired the company in 2016. The company also built Assistant.ai, the highest-rated independent voice assistant in the world with 40M+ users. Ilya was also the Founding Head of the Google Assistant Investments program at Google.
Michael Ermolenko
(Co-Founder & CTO)Michael has extensive experience in leading AI teams and led Machine Learning Development at API.ai and the Dialogflow NLU/AI team at Google.
Kylan Gibbs
(Co-Founder & CEO)Kylan has a background in turning advanced AI into products that naturally interact with humans. They came from DeepMind, where they led products for Conversational AI and Generative Models. Prior, Kylan worked on enterprise Machine Learning projects at Bain & Company.
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