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Inworld AI

Real-time AI NPC engine for gaming

Head of Customer Success & Account Management

Full-TimeUpdated on 10/15/2026
$230k - $290k+ Variable compensation + Equity
Expert
Mountain View, CA, USA
HybridOn-site at the Mountain View office a few days a week; candidates ideally reside in or relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area, though remote candidates may be considered.
Sales & Account ManagementAccount Management

About the job

Requirements
  • At least 7 years of experience in customer success, account management, or post-sales, including at least 3 years leading and hiring teams.
  • A track record of building or scaling a post-sales motion at a high-growth startup and consistently delivering strong gross retention, net retention, and expansion results.
  • Experience owning a renewal and expansion number, forecasting accurately, negotiating complex renewals, and creating account growth plans.
  • Deep experience managing strategic enterprise customers, building executive relationships, and navigating technical, operational, and commercial complexity.
  • Comfort with highly technical products and technical buyers, and credibility engaging Product and Engineering teams as well as senior business stakeholders.
  • Hands-on command of modern customer relationship management and customer success tools, plus a strong point of view on using artificial intelligence, automation, product usage, and customer signals to scale the function.
  • Demonstrated ability to hire, ramp, and retain strong Customer Success and Account Management talent, with a bench of people who would join again.
  • Ability to operate independently and thrive in ambiguity, with no task too small, and exceptional written and verbal communication skills.
Responsibilities
  • Own gross and net revenue retention, renewal performance, and expansion pipeline; set targets, build the forecast, and hold the team accountable to predictable renewals and durable account growth.
  • Build a rigorous customer lifecycle from onboarding through adoption and value realization, including success plans, health scoring, usage milestones, and executive business reviews; ensure customers can tie products to measurable business outcomes.
  • Personally own the highest-value and most complex accounts; build multi-threaded relationships across technical, business, and executive stakeholders; lead renewal and expansion strategy; and navigate escalations with urgency and judgment.
  • Define customer segmentation, coverage, service levels, and the division of responsibilities across Customer Success, Account Management, Solutions, Support, and Sales; create repeatable playbooks that scale without sacrificing customer quality.
  • Own the post-sales technology stack and reporting layer, including customer relationship management hygiene, customer health, product usage, and renewal and expansion forecasting.
  • Use artificial intelligence agents and automation for account research, meeting intelligence, risk detection, next-best actions, and scalable customer engagement.
  • Partner with Sales on handoffs and account strategy, and with Product, Engineering, and Support on adoption blockers, escalations, and the voice of the customer; translate recurring customer needs into clear product and operational priorities.
  • Directly manage strategic accounts while recruiting, ramping, and coaching the first Customer Success and Account Management hires.

About the company

Inworld AI creates AI-powered non-player characters for games. These NPCs have distinct personalities, contextual awareness, memory, and emotional intelligence to deepen immersion. Their character engine runs in real-time with low latency and includes safety, knowledge, memory, narrative controls, and multimodal abilities, built by the Dialogflow team for production-ready scalability. The product helps game developers monetize by selling access to the engine to enable autonomous, goal-driven NPCs that can learn and adapt within the game world.

Company Size

51-200

Company Stage

Series A

Total Funding

$117M

Headquarters

Mountain View, California

Founded

2021

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Tencent Cloud embedded Inworld TTS into Tencent RTC on June 16, 2026.
  • AudioStack added Inworld on September 9, 2026, widening enterprise distribution.
  • Inworld said revenue grew fivefold since early 2026, validating demand for cheaper infrastructure.

What critics are saying

  • ElevenLabs and OpenAI commoditize expressive TTS, crushing Inworld's pricing power by 2027.
  • Consumer AI margins stay brutal; Inworld's June 2026 price cuts signal a race downward.
  • One bad model outage or safety failure kills trust across gaming, companions, and support.

What makes Inworld AI unique

  • October 2026 Ultravox adds turn-taking and interruption handling to Inworld voice agents.
  • Inworld Realtime TTS-2 ships 200+ languages, natural-language steering, and sub-100ms latency.
  • OpenAI-compatible APIs and SDKs let developers swap Inworld into existing stacks fast.

Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?

Benefits

  • Remote friendly
  • Flexible work hours
  • Unlimited PTO
  • Competitive compensation
  • Medical, dental, and mental health
  • Tech setup

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

-2%

1 year growth

1%

2 year growth

2%
Yahoo Finance
Oct 14th, 2026
Inworld launches Realtime Inference, with 99.9995% completion across 20 million requests

Inworld, a research lab and inference provider focused on realtime AI for consumer apps, launched Realtime Inference on October 14, 2026. The first-party service runs open models through an OpenAI-compatible API and the company's Realtime Router. Developers can use Inworld-hosted models, including Gemma, DeepSeek, GLM, Qwen, and MiMo, or combine them with more than 100 third-party models. Features include cache-aware serving, conditional routing, failover, and per-request observability. In a replay of 5,000 production requests for GLM 5.3 Flash, cache-aware routing raised the cache-hit rate from 25% to 47%. Over 30 days, the model completed more than 20 million requests with 98 counted failures. Wishroll's AI social simulation Status reached one million users in 19 days, with over 20x cost reduction, according to its chief executive officer, Fai Nur. The service is available now through Inworld's developer platform.

GeekWire
Oct 2nd, 2026
Seattle voice AI startup Ultravox, formerly known as Fixie, acquired by Inworld.

Seattle voice AI startup Ultravox, formerly known as Fixie, acquired by Inworld. Seattle voice AI startup Ultravox, which launched as Fixie, has been acquired by Inworld for an undisclosed sum. Ultravox was founded in 2022 by Google and Apple veterans to build a speech model for real-time, natural-sounding AI voice agents. In perhaps its most whimsical project, the startup launched the HiSanta.ai website in December 2023, allowing users to chat with Santa Claus, who spoke with a British accent, as well as Rudolph, Mrs. Claus and other North Pole notables. The site is no longer active. The company announced a $17 million seed round in March 2023, and PitchBook put its valuation at $51.46 million at the time. Redpoint Ventures led the round, which included Madrona Venture Group, Zetta Venture Partners, SignalFire, Bloomberg Beta and Kearny Jackson. Current and former executives at Google, Amazon and Apple also invested. Ultravox has 10 employees, according to LinkedIn. It was unclear whether the entire team would join Inworld, which is based in Mountain View, Calif. "We're excited to welcome members of the Ultravox team and continue building the platform," said Inworld CEO Kylan Gibbs in a statement. The acquisition will allow Inworld to adopt Ultravox's technology for managing turn-taking and interruptions in voice conversations with AI, which should improve performance in real-time chats. Inworld has raised $119.8 million since launching in 2021 and is valued at $515 million, according to PitchBook. Ultravox co-founder Zach Koch was most recently the company's CEO. His LinkedIn profile says he is now vice president of product at Shopify. Peter Salas, who joined the company as a software engineer in 2023, is currently listed as chief technology officer. The startup's original CEO, Matt Welsh, departed two years ago and is now head of AI systems at defense company Palantir Technologies. Co-founders Hessam Bagherinezhad and Justin Uberti also left, in 2023 and 2024 respectively, and both joined OpenAI. The release announcing the acquisition said Ultravox customers would be upgraded to Inworld's Realtime TTS-2 voice technology.

Yahoo Finance
Oct 1st, 2026
AI Research Lab Inworld Acquires Voice Agent Platform Ultravox

SEATTLE & MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., October 01, 2026--Inworld acquires Ultravox, uniting real-time voice AI and model inference to build a full infrastructure stack for the next generation of consumer AI.

ExchangeWire
Sep 15th, 2026
AudioStack adds Inworld to its voice roster.

AudioStack adds Inworld to its voice roster. AudioStack, the agentic audio production platform for media and advertising, has announced Inworld as its newest voice partner, bringing the platform's total roster of voice, music, and sound providers to nineteen. The addition gives customers a wider set of regional and demographic options to draw on from within a single, model-agnostic platform. "Inworld is exactly the kind of partner that makes this platform better, not just bigger. Strong regional coverage, real range across ages - that's the kind of depth we're building toward," said Erik Barraud, CPO at AudioStack. "What stood out with Inworld was the UK accent coverage, paired with a genuinely wide age range across their voices, which gives customers a lot more precision when a brief calls for a specific kind of person, not just a specific kind of sound. That precision matters because voice is personal - the right accent and age in context is often what makes a listener feel like a creative is actually speaking to them, not just at them. That's the kind of connection we want every customer to be able to build." This is one of the quieter benefits of building with AudioStack: the platform keeps expanding, but nothing changes for customers. There's no new contract to sign, no separate integration to build, and no additional setup required when a new partner joins the roster. Customers get more to work with - never more to manage. The partnership gives Inworld a direct route into AudioStack's customer base and its agentic production tools. "Being added as a Voice AI provider puts Inworld voices right where the work happens, and we're glad to be part of it.," said Kylan Gibbs, CEO at Inworld. Inworld's voices are live now on the AudioStack platform. AudioStack said the roster will keep expanding on the same basis - depth and quality over headline count, with regional and demographic range to match, and zero extra work for customers along the way. AudioStack. Quality Audio Fast. AudioStack is the leading enterprise solution for AI audio production. The proprietary technology connects AI-powered media creation forms such as AI script generation, lifelike text-to-speech, speech-to-speech, generative music a... Powered by PressBox

Business Wire
Sep 12th, 2026
Inworld AI, the Leading Character Engine, Raises New Funding From Lightspeed, Stanford, Microsoft’s M12 Fund, First Spark (Eric Schmidt), and More, Bringing Valuation to Over $500 Million

Inworld AI, the leading Character Engine, has raised new funding from Lightspeed and more - bringing the new valuation of the company to over $500M.