Engineering Manager, API

Job description

We are building AI to simulate the world through merging art and science. We believe that world models are at the frontier of progress in artificial intelligence. Language models alone won’t solve the world’s hardest problems – robotics, disease, scientific discovery. Real progress requires models that experience the world and learn from their mistakes, the same way that humans do. And this kind of trial and error can be massively accelerated when done in simulation, rather than in the real world. World models offer the most clear path to general-purpose simulation, changing how stories are told, how scientific progress is made and how the next frontiers of humanity are reached. Our team consists of creative, open minded, caring and ambitious people who are determined to change the world. We aspire to continuously build impossible things and our ability to do so relies on building an incredible team. If you are driven to do the same, we'd love to hear from you. ABOUT THE ROLE We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the team responsible for Runway's product platform and API. You should have experience growing high-performing engineering teams and be deeply interested in the intersection of product development, APIs, and distributed systems. You will will manage our current and growing team of 5. You’ll have a chance to work closely with our product engineering, product management, and finance teams to build low-latency, high-reliability APIs for our AI-powered creation tools as well as the infrastructure to support them. A PEEK AT OUR TECHNICAL STACK Our API endpoints for real-time collaboration and media asset management is written in TypeScript, and runs in ECS containers on AWS Fargate. We leverage multiple AWS-native components, such as S3, CloudFront, Lambda, Kinesis, and SQS, as building blocks of our infrastructure. Our inference backend is written in Python (PyTorch, TorchScript), and is deployed across multiple clusters / cloud providers. We use Kubernetes for container orchestration, and k8s-native components such as Flyte, Kueue, and Kyverno efficient job orchestration. We invest in prometheus and grafana for monitoring, and Terraform to manage our infrastructure. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Drive platform strategy and architecture for our TypeScript-based API infrastructure, ensuring code quality, maintainability, and scalability as we grow - Own the public API domain end-to-end, from technical architecture to revenue growth, ensuring it's a high-quality, revenue-generating platform that developers love - Manage our data and analytics infrastructure, ensuring data integrity, security, and accessibility for teams across the company - Lead and grow a team of 4-6 platform engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement - Partner with Product Engineering teams to unblock new feature launches, providing platform support and ensuring smooth integration between frontend experiences and backend capabilities - Own critical data pipelines and metrics that power business decisions across Finance (cost-of-sales, revenue attribution), Support (usage analytics, error tracking), and Product (feature adoption, performance metrics) - Work cross-functionally with leadership to set priorities, communicate progress, and align platform investments with business goals WHAT YOU’LL NEED - 2+ years of experience in an engineering manager or team lead role, with a track record of building and scaling high-performing teams - 5+ years of hands-on engineering experience, with specific expertise operating TypeScript services in the cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure) - Strong product sensibility and business acumen – you understand how technical decisions impact revenue, customer satisfaction, and company metrics - Experience owning revenue-generating platforms or products, with an understanding of API economics, usage-based pricing, and developer experience - Solid foundation in data engineering and analytics, including experience with metrics pipelines, data modeling, and business intelligence tooling - Database expertise, particularly in managing production databases at scale, data migrations, and ensuring data integrity - Excellent cross-functional communication skills – you can translate technical concepts for business teams, explain business constraints to engineers, and build consensus across diverse stakeholders - Comfort with ambiguity and rapid iteration – you can make smart trade-offs between perfect and good-enough in a fast-moving startup environment - Empathetic and inclusive leadership style that empowers engineers to do their best work Runway strives to recruit and retain exceptional talent from diverse backgrounds while ensuring pay equity for our team. Our salary ranges are based on competitive market rates for our size, stage and industry, and salary is just one part of the overall compensation package we provide. There are many factors that go into salary determinations, including relevant experience, skill level and qualifications assessed during the interview process, and maintaining internal equity with peers on the team. The range shared below is a general expectation for the function as posted, but we are also open to considering candidates who may be more or less experienced than outlined in the job description. In this case, we will communicate any updates in the expected salary range. Lastly, the provided range is the expected salary for candidates in the U.S. Outside of those regions, there may be a change in the range, which again, will be communicated to candidates. WORKING AT RUNWAY Great things come from great teams. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwmj4ato2kw&ab_channel=Runway We’d love to hear from you. We’re committed to creating a space where our employees can bring their full selves to work and have equal opportunity to succeed. So regardless of race, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, origin, ability, age, veteran status, if joining this mission speaks to you, we encourage you to apply. More about Runway - Universal World Simulator https://runwayml.com/world-simulator.html - GWM-1 https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-runway-gwm-1 - Gen-4.5 https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-runway-gen-4.5 - General World Models https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-general-world-models - Robotics SDK https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-runway-gwm-1#robotics-section - Conversational Real-time Agents https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-runway-gwm-1#avatars-section - Runway Studios https://runwayml.com/studios We're excited to be recognized as a best place to work: Crain's https://www.crainsnewyork.com/awards/best-places-work-2023 | InHerSight https://www.inhersight.com/companies/best/city/new-york-city-ny | BuiltIn NYC https://builtin.com/awards/new-york-city/2024/best-places-to-work | INC https://www.inc.com/best-workplaces/2024