Member of Technical Staff, Research Engineer
At a glance
Senior AI Research role at Runway. Remote, United States · full-time · $270,000–$370,000 base.
remoteroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Run trials that teach world models to follow actions, alter scenes, control cameras and learn other behaviors
- Test different data approaches, model designs and training methods to improve model capabilities
- Build evaluations of model performance and use the findings to guide improvements
- Move research prototypes into production, working with product and creative teams on application-specific gaps
- Advance projects across data pipelines, model development and production inference
What you bring
- At least four years working in machine learning research or engineering
- You understand how large multimodal generative models are designed, trained and run
- You have built reliable data pipelines for both pretraining and post-training
- You can work across data, training, evaluation and deployment, and have used an ML framework such as PyTorch or JAX
- You have experience with distributed training at scale
Who this fits
This suits a research engineer who can move between data work, model experiments, evaluation and deployment, and adapt quickly as project needs shift. The role is remote in the United States.
From the employer
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.
*Titles posted to our careers page are updated regularly to best advertise the role and expected seniority, but internally we have a flat titling system with two types of titles: one for individual contributors and one for people managers.
About the role
We’re looking for Research Engineers to contribute to our ambitious research agenda spanning multimodal foundational models, interactive world modeling, and real-time generation. This role is highly collaborative and will touch many aspects of our broader research efforts, taking a full-stack approach across pretraining, SFT/RL post-training techniques, evaluation, and bringing models to production.
What you’ll do
Run experiments to teach world models new behaviors — action following, scene manipulation, camera control, and beyond
Develop and test new data strategies, architectural variants, and training techniques
Design evaluations that measure model capabilities, and use them to drive model improvement
Take features from research prototype to production, collaborating with product and creative teams to address application-specific gaps
Contribute across the entire stack (data pipelines, modeling, production inference) to move projects forward
What you’ll need
4+ years of experience in machine learning research or engineering
Familiarity with the architecture, training, and inference of large-scale multimodal generative models
Experience building robust data pipelines for pretraining and post-training
Comfort working across the full research stack: data, training, evaluation, and deployment
Proficiency with at least one ML framework (e.g. PyTorch, JAX) and experience with distributed training at scale
Ability to context-switch quickly and drive projects forward in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment
Excitement about building AI that simulates the world
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. 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
We're excited to be recognized as a best place to work:
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