Backend Engineer, Public API & Scale (Remote)

Workman Labs; United States; Hybrid; USD 240,000 - 290,000; Full time

Job summary

Runway is hiring a backend engineer to own the public API and product platform, delivering low-latency inference to developers. The role involves building in TypeScript on AWS and running in ECS/Fargate, with a focus on scalable, secure APIs and robust infrastructure.

You will work across teams to optimize queries, implement rate limiting and monitoring, and improve developer tooling and documentation for a strong API developer experience.

Qualifications

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

TypeScript

Python

AWS

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

REST APIs

Tools

Flyte

Kyverno

Terraform

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

Member of Technical Staff, Backend Engineer, API

Runway is hiring a backend engineer for the team that builds its public API and product platform, working in TypeScript on AWS to serve low-latency inference to developers.

$240,000 – $290,000 / yr

Location

Remote (US)

Remote

Seniority

—

Compared with 49 other Engineering roles: Common across similar roles Unique to this role

What you'll do

Responsibilities

• 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 Common
• 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'll need

Experience

• 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.
• 3+ years of industry experience building production APIs
• Strong TypeScript experience, so you can jump in and be productive immediately Unique
• 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 Unique
• Experience architecting production-ready systems at scale using cloud primitives from AWS, GCP, or Azure Common
• 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 Unique