Founding AI Solutions Engineer - USA
Mid-level Solutions & Sales Engineering role at Inworld. Mountain View, California, USA · full-time · $170,000–$250,000 base.
Growth Roles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Lead technical discovery, POCs, and solution design across deals from the first call through close
- Create prototypes and reference integrations using Inworld’s TTS, STT, LLM Router, inference, and Realtime API offerings
- Guide customers through onboarding and help move signed contracts into production-ready integrations
- Turn customer needs into clear input for Product and Engineering while answering complex technical questions live
- Build reusable demos, integration examples, and sales collateral, then help shape the early technical sales process
What you bring
- At least five years in a customer-facing technical role such as Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Solutions Architect, or Technical Account Manager
- Production-level coding skills, with Python preferred and JavaScript or TypeScript useful
- Strong working knowledge of LLM, speech, and streaming APIs, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to varied audiences
- Experience taking technical POCs from start to finish and guiding customers toward a decision
- A technical bachelor’s degree or higher, plus strong communication, empathy, integrity, and comfort with ambiguity
Who this fits
You’ll suit this role if you can move comfortably between sales, product, engineering, customers, and senior leaders while building hands-on integrations. Experience with voice AI, gaming, CCaaS, media, deployment infrastructure, real-time streaming, startups, or GTM tools can strengthen your fit. You must be based in the SF Bay Area or willing to relocate, and the role includes working on-site in the South Bay office a few days each week.
From the employer
About Inworld
Inworld is a research lab and inference provider focused on realtime AI for consumer-facing applications. We build first-party speech models, serve LLMs, and run the inference behind modular APIs designed for high-volume, realtime workloads.
Hundreds of millions of users interact with Inworld powered apps every day and we serve over 10 trillion LLM tokens per month. Our models and infrastructure support consumer applications across companions, healthcare, fitness, education, media, and more. Our work spans model research, realtime inference, large-scale serving infrastructure, and the APIs developers use to bring these capabilities into production.
We’ve raised more than $125M from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Section 32, Kleiner Perkins, Microsoft’s M12 venture fund, Founders Fund, Meta, Stanford, and others. Our technology has powered experiences from companies including NVIDIA, Microsoft Xbox, Niantic, Logitech Streamlabs, Wishroll, Little Umbrella, and Bible Chat. Inworld has also been recognized by CB Insights as one of the 100 most promising AI companies globally and named one of LinkedIn’s Top 10 Startups in the USA.
Your Impact
We're looking for a Founding AI Solutions Engineer who will sit at the intersection of sales, product, and engineering — and become the technical backbone of our revenue team. You'll work directly with the senior leadership and our GTM team to help enterprise and developer customers go from "this sounds interesting" to "this is in production."
You'll run POCs, build prototypes, and translate complex technical questions into clear answers for both engineers and executives. You'll own the technical side of deals pre- and post-signature — ensuring customers are genuinely successful, not just signed. Your work will directly shape how Inworld scales across gaming, CCaaS, media, consumer AI and beyond, and your fingerprints will be on the SE function as we build it.
What You'll Do
Partner with GTM Leads on deals — lead technical discovery, run POCs, and own the solution design from first call through close
Build working prototypes and reference integrations that demonstrate Inworld's TTS, STT, LLM Router, LLM inference, and Realtime API solutions in the customer's actual context — not just a demo environment
Serve as the primary technical advisor during onboarding, getting customers from signed contract to production-quality integration
Translate customer requirements into actionable feedback for Product and Engineering
Answer deep technical questions live — latency tradeoffs, on-prem vs. cloud deployment, streaming architecture, model selection — without needing backup
Build and maintain a library of integration examples, demo environments, and technical collateral that the whole GTM team can use
Identify expansion opportunities by understanding what customers are building and where Inworld can do more
Contribute to shaping our technical sales process as an early hire — you'll define what great looks like here
Work closely with GTM leadership to redefine modern GTM and sales process
What You'll Bring
5+ years of experience in a customer-facing technical role (Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Solutions Architect, or Technical Account Manager)
Strong hands-on coding ability — you can write production-quality integration code, not just scripts. Python strongly preferred; JavaScript/TypeScript a plus
Deep familiarity with AI/ML APIs — you understand how to work with LLMs, speech models, and streaming APIs, and can explain tradeoffs to both engineers and executives
Demonstrated ability to run technical POCs end-to-end and drive them to a decision
Effective communicator who can bridge technical and business conversations with ease
High level of empathy and integrity in customer interactions
Thrives in ambiguity and sees constant change as opportunity, not obstacle
Bachelor's degree or higher in a technical domain
Bonus Qualifications
Experience with voice AI, TTS, STT, or real-time audio and speech systems
Background in gaming, CCaaS, or media and entertainment — our top customer verticals
Familiarity with on-premise and edge deployment patterns (containerization, model serving, quantization)
Experience with WebSocket/WebRTC or real-time streaming infrastructure
Prior experience at a high-growth startup or as a founder/operator
Experience with modern GTM tooling (Clay, n8n, Zapier, etc.)
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).
The base salary range for this full-time position is $170,000 - $250,000+ bonus + equity + benefits.
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