Staff / Principal Research Scientist - Switzerland
About Inworld
Inworld is a product-oriented research lab of top AI researchers and engineers, developing best-in-class realtime multimodal models and the only realtime orchestration platform optimized for thousands of queries per second.
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.
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
You don’t need a roadmap to start walking; you’re comfortable picking a direction and building the map as you go
You believe research isn't finished until it’s shipped. You have a bias for impact over purely academic output
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
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.
Location & Employment
Location: remote within Switzerland
Employment type: Full-time, permanent employment
Hiring model: Employment via Employer of Record (EOR)
Candidates must already have the legal right to work in Switzerland, as visa sponsorship is not available for this role. 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.