Staff Research Engineer: World-Model AI & Simulation

Visa Hunt; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Runway is seeking a Research Engineer to contribute to ambitious research across multimodal foundational models, interactive world modeling, and real-time generation. You will work collaboratively, spanning pretraining, SFT/RL post-training, evaluation, and bringing models to production.

The role touches data pipelines, modeling, and production inference, requiring strong ML fundamentals, proficiency in PyTorch or JAX, and experience with distributed training at scale.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in machine learning research or engineering.
• Familiarity with the architecture, training, and inference of large-scale multimodal generative models.
• Experience building robust data pipelines for pretraining and post-training.
• Comfort working across the full research stack: data, training, evaluation, and deployment.
• Proficiency with at least one ML framework (e.g. PyTorch, JAX) and experience with distributed training at scale.
• Ability to context-switch quickly and drive projects forward in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment.
• Excitement about building AI that simulates the world.

Responsibilities

• Run experiments to teach world models new behaviors — action following, scene manipulation, camera control, and beyond
• Develop and test new data strategies, architectural variants, and training techniques
• Design evaluations that measure model capabilities, and use them to drive model improvement
• Take features from research prototype to production, collaborating with product and creative teams to address application-specific gaps
• Contribute across the entire stack (data pipelines, modeling, production inference) to move projects forward

Skills

machine learning

multimodal models

data pipelines

PyTorch

JAX

distributed training

full research stack

world simulation

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Job description

Runway is seeking a Research Engineer to contribute to ambitious research across multimodal foundational models, interactive world modeling, and real-time generation. You will work collaboratively, spanning pretraining, SFT/RL post-training, evaluation, and bringing models to production.

The role touches data pipelines, modeling, and production inference, requiring strong ML fundamentals, proficiency in PyTorch or JAX, and experience with distributed training at scale.