Member of Technical Staff Research Tooling and Data Platform

Member of Technical Staff, Research Tooling & Data Platform at Runway

Runway is building AI to simulate the world by merging art and science. We believe world models are the frontier of AI progress, crucial for solving complex problems in robotics, disease, and scientific discovery. Our team is composed of creative, open-minded, caring, and ambitious individuals dedicated to changing the world and building the impossible.

About The Role

We are seeking an engineer to take ownership of Runway's internal exploratory data analysis (EDA) and evaluation platform. This platform is vital for our ML research, design, product, and creative teams, directly impacting research velocity and decision-making across the company. You will be responsible for the entire product experience, from optimizing database queries and managing infrastructure to developing user-facing features that simplify complex ML workflows for non-engineers.

A Peek at Our Technical Stack

• API endpoints for real-time collaboration and media asset management: TypeScript, ECS on AWS Fargate.
• AWS-native components: S3, CloudFront, Lambda, Kinesis, SQS.
• Inference backend: Python (PyTorch, TorchScript), multiple clusters/cloud providers, Kubernetes for orchestration.
• Kubernetes-native components: Flyte, Kueue, Kyverno for job orchestration.
• Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana.
• Infrastructure management: Terraform.

What You’ll Do

• Own the EDA platform end-to-end: Take full ownership of architecture, infrastructure, feature development, and operations.
• Optimize for scale: Improve query performance and write efficiency for vector search, integrate with new data warehouses, and optimize our custom query parsing/suggestion system.
• Build for researchers: Design and ship features that help ML researchers source data faster, run more effective evaluations, and iterate quickly.
• Enable cross-functional users: Work with design, product, and creative teams to build intuitive evaluation workflows.
• Manage infrastructure: Deploy and maintain services across ECS and Kubernetes, including embedding services and database integrations.
• Provide support: Be responsive to user needs, debug issues quickly, and gather feedback to prioritize improvements.

What You’ll Need

• 4+ years of industry experience in a backend-focused software engineering role.
• Strong experience in at least 2 of 3 areas: platform/infrastructure, ML domain knowledge, or frontend/product engineering, with eagerness to learn the third.
• Platform/infrastructure: Experience with vector databases, cloud primitives (i.e., SQS, ECR, Kinesis), and container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS).
• ML domain knowledge: Understanding of ML workflows, model training, evaluation, testing, dataset management, feature engineering, or research tooling.
• Product engineering: Ability to build clean, intuitive user experiences with product thinking and user empathy. TypeScript/React experience is a plus.
• Comfortable setting up and maintaining production infrastructure and services.
• Self-starter who can navigate ambiguity and make pragmatic technical decisions.
• Humility and open-mindedness; at Runway, we value learning from one another.

Working at Runway

Runway strives to recruit and retain exceptional talent from diverse backgrounds while ensuring pay equity. Our salary ranges are based on competitive market rates for our size, stage, and industry. Compensation includes salary, equity, and benefits.

We are committed to creating an inclusive space where employees can thrive. We encourage applications from all qualified individuals.

Key skills/competency

• Platform Engineering
• Infrastructure Management
• Cloud Primitives (AWS)
• Container Orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS)
• Vector Databases
• ML Workflows
• Research Tooling
• Backend Software Engineering
• TypeScript
• React