Member of Technical Staff, Backend Engineer, 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 API engineer to join our core API team and help scale Runway's platform serving millions of users and handling thousands of requests per second. You'll work on the critical infrastructure that powers both our public API (used by external developers) and internal tools, managing user data, task orchestration, billing, permissions, and asset management. This is a high-impact role on a mature, production system. You'll build enterprise features, optimize database performance, design async workflows, and ensure reliability at scale. If you're passionate about API development, love TypeScript, and want to own systems end-to-end, this is the role for you. 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 - Own the full API lifecycle from design and implementation to monitoring, optimization, and documentation for both public and internal APIs - Design and implement async workflows for task orchestration, content moderation, prompt enhancement, and post-processing pipelines - Optimize database queries and improve performance for a high-traffic Postgres database - Build rate limiting, fraud detection, and credit management systems - Implement comprehensive API security, rate limiting, authentication, and monitoring systems to ensure reliability at scale - Improve the public API developer experience with better documentation, SDKs, and tooling - Improve the performance, reliability, and code quality of our codebases WHAT YOU’LL NEED - 3+ years of industry experience building production APIs - Strong TypeScript experience, so you can jump in and be productive immediately - Experience owning systems end-to-end: infrastructure, monitoring, logging, metrics, incident response - Understanding of API design patterns, REST principles, and async workflows - Experience with relational databases (Postgres preferred) and query optimization - Experience architecting production-ready systems at scale using cloud primitives from AWS, GCP, or Azure - Ability to rapidly prototype solutions and iterate on them with tight product deadlines - Humility and open mindedness; at Runway we love to learn from one another 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