Founding AI Solutions Engineer

You'll sit at the intersection of sales, product, and engineering, becoming the technical backbone of the revenue team. You'll work directly with senior leadership and the GTM team to help enterprise and developer customers move from initial interest to production deployment. You'll run proof-of-concepts, build prototypes, and translate complex technical questions into clear answers for both engineers and executives. You'll own the technical side of deals both before and after signature, ensuring customers are genuinely successful in production, not just signed. Your work will directly shape how Inworld scales across gaming, CCaaS, media, consumer AI, and beyond, and you'll help define the Solutions Engineering function as an early hire.

Responsibilities

• Partner with GTM Leads on deals, lead technical discovery, run POCs, and own solution design from first call through close.
• Build working prototypes and reference integrations demonstrating TTS, STT, LLM Router, LLM inference, and Realtime API solutions in customer contexts.
• Serve as the primary technical advisor during onboarding, taking customers from signed contract to production-quality integration.
• Translate customer requirements into actionable feedback for Product and Engineering.
• Answer technical questions covering latency tradeoffs, on-premises versus cloud deployment, streaming architecture, and model selection.
• Build and maintain integration examples, demo environments, and technical collateral for the GTM team.
• Identify expansion opportunities by understanding customer projects and needs.
• Help shape the technical sales process as an early hire.
• Work with GTM leadership to redefine the modern GTM and sales process.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in a customer-facing technical role such as Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Solutions Architect, or Technical Account Manager.
• Strong hands-on coding ability with production-quality integration code; Python strongly preferred and JavaScript/TypeScript a plus.
• Deep familiarity with AI/ML APIs, including LLMs, speech models, and streaming APIs.
• Demonstrated ability to run technical POCs end-to-end and drive them to a decision.
• Effective communication skills bridging technical and business conversations.
• Empathy and integrity in customer interactions.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguity.
• Bachelor's degree or higher in a technical domain.
• Candidates must be based in the SF Bay Area or willing to relocate.
• Experience with voice AI, TTS, STT, real-time audio, gaming, CCaaS, media, on-premises or edge deployment, WebSocket/WebRTC, streaming infrastructure, startups, or modern GTM tooling is a bonus.

Benefits

• Bonus
• Equity
• Benefits