Backend Engineer (Member of Technical Staff, API)

• 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

• 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

• 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

Benefits

• 100% medical, dental, and vision coverage: We cover 100% of medical, dental and vision for our US employees AND their dependents. Based on the plans selected, we have complimentary mental health benefits and a free One Medical membership

• Unlimited days of PTO: We have unlimited PTO with a minimum of 15 days a year. We also have a paid sabbatical program after employees have been with Runway for 3 years and again after 5 years. And of course, we can’t forget about Summer Fridays

• 401k Matching, 3% matching: Plan for the future! We provide a 3% 401K match for our US based employees

• Remote $250 stipend: All of our employees outside of commuting distance to the office, can expense up to $250 per month on co-working spaces, lunch or groceries, and internet connection

• Donations supporting our community: Beyond our employees, we have a commitment to our communities. Every quarter, Runway employees choose an organization for the company to support through a donation

• Custom setup, tech setup stipend: In addition to the choice of laptop, all employees get a stipend to customize their tech set up as they want

• Parental leave for all parents: We offer 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave plus a gradual return to work plan. This coverage is for all parents, regardless of how a child is brought into the family

• L&D $600 stipend: We’re investing in our employees’ long term growth by giving every employee $600 per year to spend on their personal or professional development. That means conferences, courses, and books, oh my!

• Wellness $600 stipend: We set ambitious goals and work hard to achieve them, so we believe it’s important to invest in employees’ mental and physical health. The $600 annual wellness stipend can be used for anything from therapy sessions to gym memberships- 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

• Understanding of API design patterns, REST principles, and async workflows

• Strong TypeScript experience, so you can jump in and be productive immediately

• Experience with relational databases (Postgres preferred) and query optimization

• Humility and open mindedness; at Runway we love to learn from one another

• Experience owning systems end-to-end: infrastructure, monitoring, logging, metrics, incident response

• If you’re passionate about API development, love TypeScript, and want to own systems end-to-end, this is the role for you

• 3+ years of industry experience building production APIs