Backend Engineer, API (Member of Technical Staff)

About the role

Runway is building AI world models and needs an API engineer to scale its platform for millions of users, handling thousands of requests per second. You will work on both public and internal APIs, managing data, orchestration, billing, permissions, and assets.

Key responsibilities

• Own the full API lifecycle from design, implementation, monitoring, optimization, to documentation.
• Design and implement async workflows for task orchestration, content moderation, and post‑processing pipelines.
• Optimize queries and performance for a high‑traffic PostgreSQL database.
• Build rate‑limiting, fraud detection, and credit‑management systems.
• Implement comprehensive API security, authentication, and monitoring to ensure reliability at scale.

Required profile

• 3+ years of industry experience building production APIs.
• Strong TypeScript expertise and ability to be productive immediately.
• Experience owning end‑to‑end systems including infrastructure, monitoring, logging, and incident response.
• Ability to prototype quickly and meet tight product deadlines.
• Humility and openness to learning from teammates.

Required skills

• TypeScript
• AWS services (ECS, Fargate, S3, CloudFront, Lambda, Kinesis, SQS)
• Python (PyTorch, TorchScript)
• Kubernetes (including Flyte, Kueue, Kyverno)
• PostgreSQL and query optimization
• Terraform
• Prometheus and Grafana