---
title: 'Senior / Lead Research Scientist - Germany at Inworld'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-lead-research-scientist-germany-inworld-germany-13nww3a7w9p4'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-13'
---

# Senior / Lead Research Scientist - Germany at Inworld

- **Company:** Inworld
- **Location:** Germany
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-03-18
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/inworld-ai/2eacea62-b50b-4792-b289-c8a4bbbb26b8

## Job description

## 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. Who We're Looking For A year ago, reliably working agentic systems barely existed. Nobody has a decade of experience here. So we're not screening for a resume template — we're looking for strong people from varied backgrounds who learn fast, thrive in ambiguity, and can show us what they've built, broken, and understood.

## Experience We Find Useful

You don't need all of this. But you need enough to make a case.

- Foundation models: training, new architectures, RL, reward modeling, scaling
- Evaluation: benchmarks, eval loops, quality measurement, LLM-as-judge, failure analysis
- Frontier topics: multimodal models, agents, tool use, test-time compute, world models
- Published research at ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, EMNLP, ACL, or AAAI
- PhD in ML/NLP — or equivalent practical experience you can point to
- Public work: non-trivial AI side projects, interdisciplinary experiments, open-source contributions
- Full-stack research ownership: you frame the question, run the experiments, write the paper, ship the result

If you learned through building, competitions, or collaborations outside academia — that counts. We care about evidence, not credentials.

Who Thrives Here

- Pathfinders: You don’t need a roadmap to start walking; you’re comfortable picking a direction and building the map as you go.
- Full-Cycle Researchers: You believe research isn't finished until it’s shipped. You have a bias for impact over purely academic output.
- First-Principles Engineers: You don't just ship code; you obsess over the why. You’re the first to question an approach if you think there’s a better way to solve the core problem.
- Mission Owners: You aren't satisfied with "the PM said so." You thrive on deep context and want to understand the fundamental logic behind every decision we make.

What Working Here Is Like We hand you unclear problems and expect you to make them clear. We value researchers who say "I don't know yet" — and then design the experiment that finds out. We treat evaluation as a first-class research product, not a box to check before launch. Impact comes before publications though we support sharing work that moves the field forward. Your work should be visible. Flat structure, fast iterations, minimal process theater.

We don't need a cover letter. A link to something you've built tells us more.

Professional fluency in English (written and spoken) is required, as you will be collaborating daily with our US-based leadership and engineering teams.

For candidates interested in relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area in the future, full U.S. visa and relocation support may be available, subject to business needs and applicable legal and work authorization requirements. [Inworld Jobs Privacy](https://inworld.ai/jobs-privacy)

## About Inworld

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Inworld AI is the realtime AI company that builds voice AI systems—spanning speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and LLM routing—designed to feel as human as it sounds for consumer-facing applications.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series-stage undisclosed; raised $125M+)
- **Headquarters**: Mountain View, California, USA (with additional presence in Vancouver, Canada)
- **Founded**: 2021
- **Founders**: Kylan Gibbs (Co-founder & CEO), Ilya Gelfenbeyn (Co-founder & CSO), Michael Ermolenko (Co-founder & CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Artificial Intelligence – realtime voice AI infrastructure and research
- **Target customers**: B2B (developers building AI-native applications), B2C (via customer applications such as companions, language learning, interactive media), and Enterprise (Fortune 500 brands like NVIDIA, NBCU, Logitech Streamlabs)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "To transform static software into living AI systems that autonomously evolve to better serve their users."

## Products & Services
- **Realtime TTS**: Top-ranked realtime text-to-speech on the Artificial Analysis Realtime TTS Arena. Models include `inworld-tts-2` (research preview, 100+ languages with cross-lingual voice identity), `inworld-tts-1.5-max` (GA, 15 languages), and `inworld-tts-1.5-mini` (GA, lower latency). Supports voice cloning from 5–15 seconds of audio. [inworld.ai](https://inworld.ai/)
- **Realtime STT**: Speech-to-text with multi-provider transcription (Inworld, Groq Whisper, AssemblyAI, Soniox) and voice profiling (age, pitch, emotion, vocal style, accent). [inworld.ai](https://inworld.ai/)
- **Realtime API**: Full-duplex voice conversations over a single WebSocket session (STT + LLM + TTS), OpenAI Realtime protocol compatible. Ships in days, fails in fewer places. [inworld.ai](https://inworld.ai/)
- **Realtime Router**: Routes to 220+ LLMs through one OpenAI-compatible endpoint across two tracks: 3P (external providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) and 1P (Realtime Inference). [inworld.ai](https://inworld.ai/)
- **Realtime Inference**: Inworld-hosted, optimized open-source models (Gemma 4, DeepSeek V3.2/V4, MiniMax-M2.5) built for consumer-scale cost and realtime latency. [inworld.ai](https://inworld.ai/)
- **Compute**: Managed GPU for committed high-volume customers requiring predictable latency. [inworld.ai](https://inworld.ai/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – Over $125M raised
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Section 32, Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, CRV, Stanford University, Intel Capital, Microsoft M12, Meta, Samsung NEXT, LG Technology Ventures, Bitkraft. Customers include Status by Wishroll, Bible Chat, Talkpal, Particle, Luvu, NVIDIA, NBCU, and Logitech Streamlabs. [inworld.ai/resources/what-is-inworld-ai](https://inworld.ai/resources/what-is-inworld-ai)
- **Growth Signals**: Status by Wishroll reached 1M users in 19 days on Inworld with a 95% AI cost reduction. Bible Chat scaled from 2M to 20M characters/week with an 85% TTS cost reduction. Talkpal serves 5 million language learners using Realtime TTS. [inworld.ai/resources/what-is-inworld-ai](https://inworld.ai/resources/what-is-inworld-ai)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Product-oriented research lab**: The founding team led product for LLMs at DeepMind and built Dialogflow (Google). Maintains a research organization with backgrounds from Google, DeepMind, Meta, Apple, Cruise, Microsoft. [inworld.ai/resources/what-is-inworld-ai](https://inworld.ai/resources/what-is-inworld-ai)
- **Top-ranked realtime TTS**: Ranked #1 on the Artificial Analysis Realtime TTS Arena. [inworld.ai](https://inworld.ai/)
- **OpenAI Realtime API compatibility**: Developers can migrate by swapping the endpoint and auth credentials, lowering switching costs. [inworld.ai/resources/what-is-inworld-ai](https://inworld.ai/resources/what-is-inworld-ai)
- **Full stack of voice infrastructure**: From STT to LLM routing to TTS and managed compute, all in one platform—eliminating the need to stitch together multiple vendors. [inworld.ai](https://inworld.ai/)

## Strategic Focus
- **Realtime AI for consumer-facing applications**: Doubling down on companions, character chat, roleplay, customer support voice agents, sales/SDR agents, phone agents, and language learning. [inworld.ai](https://inworld.ai/)
- **Cost reduction at scale**: Consistently driving down AI costs for customers (e.g., 95% reduction for Wishroll, 85% for Bible Chat) to enable free-tier consumer economics. [inworld.ai/resources/what-is-inworld-ai](https://inworld.ai/resources/what-is-inworld-ai)
- **Enterprise expansion**: Offering on-premise deployment, HIPAA/BAA compliance, EU and India data residency, and dedicated account management. [inworld.ai/resources/what-is-inworld-ai](https://inworld.ai/resources/what-is-inworld-ai)

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: "A passionate engineering-minded team" where "technical depth is a requirement for deep empathy with our customers." The company states that no matter the role, they only hire technical people. [inworld.ai/careers](https://inworld.ai/careers)
- **Autonomy and impact**: Employees are empowered with autonomy to work across research and engineering, drive product strategy, and "leave their mark on an entire industry." [inworld.ai/careers](https://inworld.ai/careers)
- **Remote/Hybrid/Office**: Not explicitly stated on careers page, but headquarters are in Mountain View, CA, with a presence in Vancouver, Canada. Active job postings are location-specific (e.g., US-based roles). [inworld.ai/careers](https://inworld.ai/careers)
- **Notable perks/engineering culture**: Focus on research and open-source contributions (github.com/inworld-ai). The company describes itself as a "product-oriented research lab" with a strong emphasis on shipping realtime AI products. [inworld.ai/resources/what-is-inworld-ai](https://inworld.ai/resources/what-is-inworld-ai)

## Sources
1. [inworld.ai](https://inworld.ai/)
2. [inworld.ai/careers](https://inworld.ai/careers)
3. [inworld.ai/resources/what-is-inworld-ai](https://inworld.ai/resources/what-is-inworld-ai)
4. [LinkedIn – Inworld AI](https://www.linkedin.com/company/inworld-ai)
5. [Datanyze – Inworld AI Company Profile](https://www.datanyze.com/companies/inworld-ai/559637359)

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