Backend Engineer, Public API & Scale (Remote)

Workman Labs; Northern (KY); 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

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.