Staff / Principal Platform Engineer - USA
At a glance
Senior Platform & Infrastructure role at Inworld. Mountain View, California, USA · full-time · $280,000–$350,000 base.
devopsroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Plan GPU and cloud capacity for realtime inference, designing for failures and rising traffic
- Build AI-assisted tools and workflows that help engineering teams develop and deploy software faster
- Give service teams monitoring tools and processes to track reliability, availability and performance
- Maintain code integration and deployment pipelines, then investigate major failures and automate fixes
- Own cloud infrastructure end to end, working with engineers to deploy and evolve services across providers
What you bring
- Eight to ten years in software engineering, including at least three years working with infrastructure as code
- Hands-on Kubernetes experience, including preparing Kustomize manifests or Helm charts for new applications
- Experience building and maintaining delivery pipelines for applications and infrastructure, using tools such as Terraform, ArgoCD or GitHub Actions
- Strong knowledge of at least one listed cloud provider, plus skill in a backend or scripting language such as Go, Python or Bash
Who this fits
This senior role suits an experienced platform engineer who can independently identify infrastructure work and carry it through. You must live in the San Francisco Bay Area or be prepared to relocate, and work 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.
About the role
Join our team as a Staff / Principal Platform Engineer and take end-to-end ownership of building, securing, and scaling our AI products. You'll be the driving force behind our cloud infrastructure, partnering with engineers across the organization to deploy and evolve services across major cloud providers using Terraform, ArgoCD, and other tooling. In this high-impact role, you'll identify what needs to be done and move it forward, directly shaping how we operate and innovate.
What you’ll do
Design systems for realtime, high-volume inference: plan capacity across GPU and cloud resources, build in resilience to failures, and make sure services scale smoothly as traffic grows.
Drive engineering velocity by identifying and building AI-powered tooling and workflows that improve how our teams develop and deploy software.
Facilitate a "you build it, you run it" culture by providing the necessary tools and processes for monitoring the reliability, availability, and performance of services.
Manage pipelines to ensure smooth and efficient code integration and deployment.
Conduct root cause analysis to identify critical issues and develop automated solutions to prevent recurrence.
Expected experience
8-10 years of experience in software engineering.
3+ years of experience with infrastructure-as-code.
Proficiency in managing Kubernetes clusters and applications, including creating Kustomize manifests/Helm charts for new applications.
Experience in creating and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for both applications and infrastructure deployments (using tools like Terraform/Terragrunt, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, Ansible, etc.).
Deep knowledge of at least one major cloud provider (Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud).
Proficient in at least one backend programming/scripting languages such as Golang, Python, and Bash.
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 US base salary range for this full-time position is $280,000 - $350,000. In addition to base pay, total compensation includes equity and benefits. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location, level, and additional factors, including competencies, experience, and business needs. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future.