Staff Backend Engineer, Infrastructure

*Open to hiring remote across North America and Europe — we also have offices in NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, and London

Runway is a research company pioneering new tools for human imagination. Runway has been at the forefront of multi-modal AI systems ensuring that the future of content creation is accessible, controllable and empowering for creatives. Runway’s mission is to ensure that anyone anywhere can tell their stories. We believe that deep learning techniques applied to audiovisual content will forever change art, creativity, and design tools.

Runway is leading a shift to generative media that is unlocking an unprecedented level of creative potential. The invention of the camera 200 years ago forever changed our world – AI is a new kind of camera that will reshape storytelling forever and lead to full feature films that are entirely generated.

About the role

We’re looking for a Software Engineer for our Backend team to help us build cutting-edge, AI-powered video creation and collaboration tools. Rather than specialists, we’re seeking curiosity-driven engineers who are determined problem solvers and thrive in fast-paced, high-ownership environments. Our engineering team is highly collaborative and works on a wide variety of exciting challenges, including building backend services for interactive video processing and streaming, and deploying cutting-edge computer vision and generative models to production.

A peek at our technical stack

Our video streaming backend components are written in Python, use a lot of FFmpeg/libav and HLS for on-the-fly transcoding, PyTorch and TorchScript for ML inference, and are deployed as containerized services on Kubernetes. Our API endpoints for real-time collaboration and media asset management are written in Typescript and Node.js and are deployed as serverless functions on AWS Lambda.

What you’ll do

• Work with a world-class engineering team pushing the boundaries of creativity and content creation on the browser
• Work across the Backend stack to implement new product features for Runway’s machine learning based video creation and collaboration tools
• Create server-side components using the latest in machine learning and graphics
• Improve the performance, reliability, and code quality of our codebases

What you’ll need

• 3+ years of industry experience in a software engineering role, ideally backend focused
• Demonstrated fluency of one or more programming languages, including Python, Node.js, or Rust
• Experience in architecting production-ready systems and familiarity with debugging and profiling tools
• 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

Working at Runway

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.

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.