Applied Research Scientist

We are building AI to simulate the world through merging art and science.

We believe that world models are at the frontier of progress in artificial intelligence. Language models alone won’t solve the world’s hardest problems – robotics, disease, scientific discovery. Real progress requires models that experience the world and learn from their mistakes, the same way that humans do. And this kind of trial and error can be massively accelerated when done in simulation, rather than in the real world.

World models offer the most clear path to general-purpose simulation, changing how stories are told, how scientific progress is made and how the next frontiers of humanity are reached.

Our team consists of creative, open minded, caring and ambitious people who are determined to change the world. We aspire to continuously build impossible things and our ability to do so relies on building an incredible team. If you are driven to do the same, we'd love to hear from you.

*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.

About the role

We’re looking for Applied Research Scientists to help us develop cutting-edge computer vision and generative models to power our creative tools. We are looking for candidates with a strong background building impactful and novel machine learning projects, strong software engineering skills, and who are deeply interested in seeing their research materialize in novel user interfaces for creative tasks.

This is a cross-functional team that requires strong communication and collaboration skills; you will have a chance to work with our backend team to help bring your research models to production, and with our design and frontend engineering team to make sure that your machine learning models work in harmony with the user interfaces that interact with them.

What you’ll need

• 4+ years of relevant engineering or research experience in machine learning, computer vision and/or graphics

• Expertise with programming such as Python, C++, CUDA, and deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch. Very strong programming skills and ability to write clean and maintainable research code

• Deep interest in building human-in-the-loop systems for creativity

• Passion for seeing research through from initial conception to eventual application

• Experience mentoring and teaching other researchers

• Strong communication, collaboration, and documentation skills

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.

There are many factors that go into salary determinations, including relevant experience, skill level and qualifications assessed during the interview process, and maintaining internal equity with peers on the team. The range shared below is a general expectation for the function as posted, but we are also open to considering candidates who may be more or less experienced than outlined in the job description. In this case, we will communicate any updates in the expected salary range.

Lastly, the provided range is the expected salary for candidates in the U.S. Outside of those regions, there may be a change in the range, which again, will be communicated to candidates.

Working at Runway

Great things come from great teams. We’d love to hear from you.

We’re committed to creating a space where our employees can bring their full selves to work and have equal opportunity to succeed. So regardless of race, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, origin, ability, age, veteran status, if joining this mission speaks to you, we encourage you to apply.

More about Runway

• Universal World Simulator

• GWM-1

• Gen-4.5

• General World Models

• Robotics SDK

• Conversational Real-time Agents

• Runway Studios

We're excited to be recognized as a best place to work:

Crain's | InHerSight | BuiltIn NYC | INC