Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

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.

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.