Engineering Manager, API

Introduction

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.

About the role

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the team responsible for Runway's product platform and API. You should have experience growing high-performing engineering teams and be deeply interested in the intersection of product development, APIs, and distributed systems. You will manage our current and growing team of 5.

You’ll have a chance to work closely with our product engineering, product management, and finance teams to build low-latency, high-reliability APIs for our AI-powered creation tools as well as the infrastructure to support them.

A peek at our technical stack

Our API endpoints for real-time collaboration and media asset management is written in TypeScript, and runs in ECS containers on AWS Fargate. We leverage multiple AWS-native components, such as S3, CloudFront, Lambda, Kinesis, and SQS, as building blocks of our infrastructure.

Our inference backend is written in Python (PyTorch, TorchScript), and is deployed across multiple clusters / cloud providers. We use Kubernetes for container orchestration, and k8s-native components such as Flyte, Kueue, and Kyverno efficient job orchestration. We invest in prometheus and grafana for monitoring, and Terraform to manage our infrastructure.

What you’ll do

• Drive platform strategy and architecture for our TypeScript-based API infrastructure, ensuring code quality, maintainability, and scalability as we grow
• Own the public API domain end-to-end, from technical architecture to revenue growth, ensuring it's a high-quality, revenue-generating platform that developers love
• Manage our data and analytics infrastructure, ensuring data integrity, security, and accessibility for teams across the company
• Lead and grow a team of 4-6 platform engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement
• Partner with Product Engineering teams to unblock new feature launches, providing platform support and ensuring smooth integration between frontend experiences and backend capabilities
• Own critical data pipelines and metrics that power business decisions across Finance (cost-of-sales, revenue attribution), Support (usage analytics, error tracking), and Product (feature adoption, performance metrics)
• Work cross-functionally with leadership to set priorities, communicate progress, and align platform investments with business goals

What you’ll need

• 2+ years of experience in an engineering manager or team lead role, with a track record of building and scaling high-performing teams
• 5+ years of hands-on engineering experience, with specific expertise operating TypeScript services in the cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Strong product sensibility and business acumen – you understand how technical decisions impact revenue, customer satisfaction, and company metrics
• Experience owning revenue-generating platforms or products, with an understanding of API economics, usage-based pricing, and developer experience
• Solid foundation in data engineering and analytics, including experience with metrics pipelines, data modeling, and business intelligence tooling
• Database expertise, particularly in managing production databases at scale, data migrations, and ensuring data integrity
• Excellent cross-functional communication skills – you can translate technical concepts for business teams, explain business constraints to engineers, and build consensus across diverse stakeholders
• Comfort with ambiguity and rapid iteration – you can make smart trade-offs between perfect and good-enough in a fast-moving startup environment
• Empathetic and inclusive leadership style that empowers engineers to do their best work