Member of Technical Staff, Backend Engineer, API
Runway, Remote
The role
*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.
We're looking for an API engineer to join our core API team and help scale Runway's platform serving millions of users and handling thousands of requests per second. You'll work on the critical infrastructure that powers both our public API (used by external developers) and internal tools, managing user data, task orchestration, billing, permissions, and asset management.
This is a high-impact role on a mature, production system. You'll build enterprise features, optimize database performance, design async workflows, and ensure reliability at scale. If you're passionate about API development, love TypeScript, and want to own systems end-to-end, this is the role for you.
What you will do
- Own the full API lifecycle from design and implementation to monitoring, optimization, and documentation for both public and internal APIs
- 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 comprehensive API security, rate limiting, authentication, and monitoring systems to ensure reliability at scale
- Improve the public API developer experience with better documentation, SDKs, and tooling
- Improve the performance, reliability, and code quality of our codebases
What you need
- 3+ years of industry experience building production APIs
- Strong TypeScript experience, so you can jump in and be productive immediately
- 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 (Postgres preferred) and query optimization
- 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; at Runway we love to learn from one another
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.