Forward Deployed Engineer
Runway · Full-time · Posted 1w ago
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.
Why this matters
Runway is building AI to simulate the world. We think world models, not language models alone, are the path to general-purpose simulation: systems that experience the world, learn from their mistakes, and change how stories get told, how science gets done, and how the next frontiers of humanity are reached.
Applied AI is where that research meets a customer with a deadline. Every one of the world's largest studios, brands, and platforms hits a moment where Runway stops being a demo and becomes the way they actually make things. Our team exists for that moment, and we organize around one question: what's blocking this customer from production, and how do we remove it?
About the role
This is a role for people who want to own a problem, not an account. You'll sit with the biggest studios, brands, and Fortune 100 companies in the world, figure out what's actually standing between them and production, and build whatever removes it. Some weeks that's a workflow. Some weeks it's a plugin or an integration nobody has written yet. Some weeks it's getting a room of executives to make a decision they've been putting off.
Your work will be on screen: Emmy-winning shows, Oscar-winning films, Super Bowl commercials, the stuff people actually watch. And the things you build for one customer tend to become product for all of them. Our team's first Shopify plugin started as a customer blocker and was in engineering's hands within a few weeks. We treat this team as R&D for that reason, not as a cost center.
We have offices in NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, and London.
No two weeks are the same, but you can expect to:
Find the real problem: sit with the creative, technical, and executive teams at a customer, map how they actually work, and locate the blocker between them and production. Usually it's one of three things: a missing integration, an unproven pipeline, or a stakeholder who isn't convinced yet.
Build the first of its kind: the demo that shows a studio head or a Fortune 100 CMO something nobody has shown them before. Working proofs of concept on the customer's own brand, footage, or catalog, often built in a day or two before the meeting, and the best of them become product for everyone.
Make it reusable: turn the one-off that unblocked one customer into the workflow, plugin, or integration the next ten customers start from.
Run the evaluation: own evaluation plans end to end, guide managed trials, build tailored demos on the customer's own footage and brand, and carry the technical side of deal cycles with AEs.
Scope deployments that land: 4–12 week engagements with customer-defined success criteria, a hands-on builder and an executive sponsor on their side from day one, and enough discipline to keep them on scope when the asks start piling up.
Get customers to production fast: take new technical and non-technical customers from signed contract to first production call in days rather than quarters, grow API-only accounts into Platform + API, and fix the onboarding so the support tickets stop coming.
Present to anyone: walk an analyst through a pipeline in the morning and a studio head through a production plan in the afternoon.
Bring the field back to the product: embed with Product, Engineering, and Creative to turn what you saw at the customer into roadmap. Every repeat ask is a product requirement, not a patch.
Measure what the customer measures: time to production, usage before and after a project, what they shipped because you were there. We track our own numbers in Salesforce and the warehouse; you'll own yours.
What we value
People who aren't satisfied with surface-level answers and will go into the data, the code, and the room to find the real one
Low ego: the customer's outcome matters more than who gets the credit
Comfort with open-ended problems in unstructured environments, and the instinct to create structure instead of waiting for it
Builders who would rather prototype than debate, and who keep iterating with the customer until it actually works
Adaptive and introspective: willing to learn, guide, lead, and follow
What we need
You build things that run in production. Python or TypeScript, APIs, integrations, and data pipelines. Whether you write the code yourself or with coding agents, you can read it, debug it when it breaks, and explain line by line why it's built that way, including to a customer's engineering team. You've shipped something a customer actually ran: a workflow, an integration, a plugin, or an internal tool.
You've deployed AI or ML systems and integrations inside complex organizations and can point to the outcome, not just the delivery
You can hold a room of executives and a room of engineers, and translate between the two. Some of those rooms are at the customer, so expect some travel.
Nice to have: data tooling (SQL, BigQuery, Retool), or experience in media, entertainment, or advertising production
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
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