Senior NodeJS Engineer

About Inworld

At Inworld, we believe that the benefits of AI should extend beyond business workflows to the applications and experiences that we enjoy every day. We began by pushing the frontier of lifelike, interactive characters for games and entertainment, pioneering realtime conversational AI at scale. Today, we apply that expertise to provide the multimodal models, pipelines and tools needed to build and evolve consumer-scale, real-time conversational AI applications across learning, health, social, assistants, games and media.

We've raised more than $125M from Lightspeed, Section 32, Kleiner Perkins, Microsoft's M12 venture fund, Founders Fund, Meta and Stanford, among others. Our technology has powered experiences from companies such as NVIDIA, Microsoft Xbox, Niantic, Logitech Streamlabs, Wishroll, Little Umbrella and Bible Chat. We've also been recognized by CB Insights as one of the 100 most promising AI companies globally and have been named one of LinkedIn's Top 10 Startups in the USA.

About the role:

This summer, Inworld launched a new platform for consumer AI applications, and we're looking for an ambitious and capable Senior NodeJS Engineer to join us and take this platform even farther.

The core of this platform is the @inworld/runtime NPM package for Node-based AI applications, which utilizes our TTS, LLM, and other APIs. Additionally, there are cloud services for features like dynamic A/B experiments, and a web experience to tie it all together.

As a Senior NodeJS engineer, you would contribute significantly to the @inworld/runtime package. It has a unique blend of challenges that should pique your interest:

• The core of the Runtime is written in C++, so what is the best way to interop with this code?

• Even though the core is written in C++, there are still challenges on the NodeJS side regarding streaming, concurrency, and high-end scale and performance.

• Providing a first-class, idiomatic developer experience (typing, API ergonomics, best practices, modern libraries, etc).

This is an IC-focused role. We are looking for someone who loves direct technical contribution, and there is plenty of scope to go around.

What you'll do:

As a Senior NodeJS Engineer, your goal is shipping useful, high quality features quickly. The more you can own and drive projects, the better. That involves:

• Establishing prioritized feature scope: Collaborate with the PMs, engineers and leads to determine the biggest product needs to focus on now. This is not a one-way flow, please participate with gusto

• Collaborating, executing, delivering: This is the core of the building loop. We aim to optimize for both speed and quality, despite it being decidedly non-obvious how to manage that tradeoff exceptionally well.

• Reflecting and driving improvements: Advocate for and realize foundational improvements, even while staying busy with feature work.

Expected experience:

Must Haves

• Excellent programming skills and experience in JavaScript and TypeScript

• A solid grasp of NodeJS fundamentals: events, the event loop, streams, async, etc.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, can collaborate and coordinate with other roles and engineer with ease, trusted and well-regarded teammate

Bonus Qualifications

• Comfortable with C++ programming.

• Experience with Node interop with C++ code via the Node API.

• Familiarity with Cursor or other AI-assisted coding tools

• Experience building AI-centric web apps and familiarity with AI and ML concepts

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 $200,000 - $250,000. 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.