Design Engineer

About the role

We are looking for a passionate Design Engineer to join Runway Labs — our research and exploration team pushing the frontier of AI video and General World Models. This is not a role focused on Runway core consumer products; instead, you’ll be embedded in a fast-moving lab environment where the work is exploratory, experimental, and technical.

This candidate should be a motivated self-starter with experience working closely with engineering and research teams to rapidly prototype and ship. You'll explore new interfaces and interaction paradigms for AI generated video, world models, and agentic systems helping translate cutting-edge research into tangible, usable experiences.

This role requires a blend of design skills and technical expertise, along with a genuine passion for both. As part of a small team, you’ll collaborate with researchers, engineers, and product designers to develop concept prototypes, design high-value interactive features, and build tools that enable new creative and research workflows.

What you’ll do

• Prototype and implement novel user experiences at the intersection of AI video, world models, and emerging generative media
• Design and build agentic tools and interfaces that allow researchers and creatives to interact with and direct AI systems in real time
• Explore new application areas for AI video and general world models — from simulation and interactive media to research tooling
• Stretch the limits of front-end engineering to broaden what’s possible in research and experimentation contexts
• Create internal tools and frameworks used across design and engineering teams at Runway Labs
• Work alongside researchers, engineers, and product designers to shape how we think about the future of AI-driven creativity

What you’ll need

• Genuine curiosity about AI video, world models, agentic engineering and generative media and an intuition for how to design meaningful interactions with these systems
• Experience designing flows, prototypes, and high-fidelity UIs for web and agentic products
• Experience building agentic tools or interfaces — i.e., systems where AI takes actions, reasons over state, or drives multi-step workflows
• Strong understanding of visual and interaction design, as well as usability testing
• Comfort working in ambiguous, research oriented environments where the problem space is still being defined
• Strong understanding of visual and interaction design, as well as usability testing.