Member of Technical Staff, ML Platform

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 ML infrastructure engineer to own model evaluation at Runway, end to end. Every decision we make about a model – which checkpoint to keep training, what to ship to millions of users, which datamix and architecture shows the most promise – rests on evals. Today that work is spread across the organization. You'll turn it into one platform. Your job will be to design and build the systems that generate samples at scale, score them with automated metrics and human annotations, track results across checkpoints and releases, and put the answers in front of researchers in minutes rather than days. You'll define what "better" means operationally – how we measure it, how confident we are, and how a result becomes a ship/no-ship decision. You'll be embedded within research teams as a member of ML Platform, and you'll set the technical direction for evals across the company. This is an extremely high-leverage role: the quality of our models is bounded by how well we can measure them. ## **A peek at our technical stack** Our inference and training code is written in Python (PyTorch) and is cloud-native. We leverage multiple clouds and use a combination of Kubernetes native and home-grown tooling for efficient job orchestration. We’re big users of agentic development and operations. We have a robust internal platform and provide broad access to the latest models and harnesses. You’ll have access to best-in-class models, agents, GPUs, storage and cloud services you need to drive a world class evaluation pipeline that helps us deliver frontier models. ## **What you'll do** - Own the evaluation platform end to end: the tooling and systems required to generate, annotate, review and adapt at frontier scale - Define the CLIs, APIs, GUIs and storage layers required to make this process seamless, fast, sophisticated and collaborative - Work directly with research teams on video, image, audio, agents, and robotics to understand what they need to measure and build it, then generalize the result into the platform - Help set the standards for how we evaluate models at Runway: reproducibility, metric definitions, reporting formats, and when a result is trustworthy enough to act on - Support broad adoption of the platform and its integration throughout Runway’s research efforts across training, production model serving and more - Contribute broadly as a member of the ML Platform team to tools and systems that help Runway train and serve frontier models ## **What you'll need** - 5+ years of experience building ML infrastructure or data platforms in production environments, with at least some of that time spent on evaluation, experimentation, or benchmarking systems - Strong Python and PyTorch, and hands-on experience running large batch GPU workloads on Kubernetes - Experience designing data pipelines and storage for large volumes of media or model outputs, with attention to versioning and reproducibility - Familiarity with experimental statistics: paired comparisons, confidence intervals, multiple-comparison pitfalls, inter-rater agreement - Comfort building internal tools end to end, from the command line to the browser - Ability to lead a broad technical area: gather requirements from many teams, set direction, make tradeoffs, and drive a roadmap without waiting to be told - Familiarity with the full model development lifecycle: data, training, evaluation, serving - Self-starter who can work embedded with research teams and move fast - Strong systems thinking and pragmatic approach to production reliability - Humility and open mindedness; at Runway we love to learn from one another ## **Nice to have** - Track record of building evaluation suites for generative models - Hands-on work with LLM- or VLM-as-judge pipelines - Experience with online experimentation platforms and connecting offline metrics to product outcomes - Prior work evaluating agents or robotics policies 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)