Member of Technical Staff, Backend Engineer, API

The role

You will join the core API team to scale a platform serving millions of users. You will work on critical infrastructure for public and internal APIs, managing user data, task orchestration, billing, permissions, and asset management.

What you will do

• Own the full API lifecycle from design and implementation to monitoring, optimization, and documentation
• Design and implement async workflows for task orchestration, content moderation, prompt enhancement, and post-processing pipelines
• Optimize database queries and improve performance for a high-traffic Postgres database
• Build rate limiting, fraud detection, and credit management systems
• Implement API security, rate limiting, authentication, and monitoring systems
• Improve the public API developer experience with documentation, SDKs, and tooling
• Improve the performance, reliability, and code quality of codebases

Required qualifications

• 3+ years of industry experience building production APIs
• Strong TypeScript experience
• Experience owning systems end-to-end: infrastructure, monitoring, logging, metrics, incident response
• Understanding of API design patterns, REST principles, and async workflows
• Experience with relational databases
• Experience architecting production-ready systems at scale using cloud primitives from AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Ability to rapidly prototype solutions and iterate on them with tight product deadlines
• Humility and open mindedness

Nice to have

• Postgres preferred

About the company

Runway is building AI to simulate the world through merging art and science. The team aims to build world models to solve hard problems in robotics, disease, and scientific discovery.