Staff Data Engineer, Inworld AI
$200-290k
+ Equity
More information about location
Office located in Mountain View, CA
AI-powered characters for virtual environments
Be an early applicant
AI-powered characters for virtual environments
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$200-290k
+ Equity
More information about location
Office located in 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 is the first time we’re hiring at this level for data engineering, so we need someone who thrives in ambiguity, takes ownership, and can operate independently from day one
- 7-10+ years of experience in Data Engineering
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent professional experience)
- Deep hands-on experience with data platforms and tooling, including BigQuery, Google Cloud Dataflow, Dagster, Looker Studio, or equivalent tools
- Strong communicator who can translate data into business decisions and influence cross-functional stakeholders
- Experience designing data architecture and providing technical guidance to others
- Candidates must be based in the SF Bay Area or willing to relocate (you will be working on-site in our South Bay office a few days a week)
What the job involves
- We’re looking for a Staff Data Engineer to own and evolve our analytics and data infrastructure
- This is a high-impact, individual contributor role at the intersection of product and engineering where you’ll be responsible not just for building pipelines, but for driving business outcomes from the data
- You’ll have the opportunity to shape our data architecture and set the technical direction for how we turn data into decisions by identifying what’s working, what’s not, and driving the actions that move the business forward
- Own our analytics platform end-to-end: assess what we have today, identify gaps, and build what’s missing
- Design and build data pipelines focused on customer intelligence to identify opportunities to grow, improve retention, and drive smarter business decisions
- Turn data into action: analyze results, surface insights, and push the organization to act on them
- Partner closely with product, engineering, and ML teams to define what we measure, why it matters, and how we operationalize insights
- Drive technical direction for our data stack and establish best practices as the function grows
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.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 15 more jobs at Inworld AI