World Models Research Engineer - Data-Centric ML

Runway; United States; Remote; USD 270,000 - 370,000; Full time

Job summary

Runway is building AI that simulates the world. We seek a Research Engineer to own data behind our models—design datasets, run experiments, and build scalable data pipelines for synthetic data generation and curation.

You will shape how data drives model capabilities across tasks and modalities, collaborating with product and creative teams to translate behaviors into data strategies and benchmarks. This role targets professionals passionate about world-model research and AI simulation.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in machine learning.
• Experience with large multimodal datasets and generative models.
• Deep intuition for how data composition and quality translate to model capabilities.
• Comfort working across the full research stack: data analysis, dataset creation, model training, evaluation, and back again.
• Proficiency with at least one ML framework (e.g. PyTorch, JAX) and distributed compute tools (e.g. Ray, Kubernetes).
• Excitement about building AI that simulates the world.

Responsibilities

• Design multimodal, multitask datasets that teach world models new capabilities — deciding what data to collect, generate, or curate and measuring its effect on model behavior
• Run controlled training experiments to understand how data composition drives model performance across tasks and domains
• Build and operate large-scale pipelines for synthetic data generation, filtering, and quality control
• Define evaluations and benchmarks that measure whether our models are actually improving at the things that matter
• Partner with product and creative teams to translate target behaviors and capabilities into concrete data strategies

Skills

ML experience

Multimodal data

Generative models

Data-centric

World simulation

Full ML stack

Distributed compute

World simulation interest

Tools

Ray

Kubernetes

PyTorch

JAX

Job description

Runway is building AI that simulates the world. We seek a Research Engineer to own data behind our models—design datasets, run experiments, and build scalable data pipelines for synthetic data generation and curation.

You will shape how data drives model capabilities across tasks and modalities, collaborating with product and creative teams to translate behaviors into data strategies and benchmarks. This role targets professionals passionate about world-model research and AI simulation.