Runway
Member of Technical Staff, Robotics Engineer
New York, NY · Staff+
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 137 days ago
Full-Stack DevelopmentRoboticsResearch
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
37Risky
Cap-exempt (no lottery)0
Sponsors this role80
Entry-level history0
PERM / green-card track0
Lottery odds40
Fits your clock70
Thin sponsorship signal and lottery-bound. A low-probability bet with your clock running. Prioritize cap-exempt roles and proven entry-level sponsors first.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →Community outcomes
No reports yet — be the first to help the next applicant.
About the role
- Open to candidates based near our NYC office or those willing to relocate.
- We're looking for a Robotics Engineer to bring our video-native foundation models onto real hardware: deploying world-model-based policies on real robots and making them work in the real world.
- This is a hands-on, execution-oriented role at the intersection of foundation models, learned robot policies, and hardware.
Responsibilities
- Own the deployment loop for learned policies (VLAs, diffusion policies, World Action Models) on real robot arms: inference serving, action decoding, controller integration, latency budgets, and safety limits
- Design demonstration data collection protocols (task setup, camera placement, teleop conventions) that produce data our world models can actually learn from - working with our existing teleop and lab infrastructure
- Partner with research to run controlled experiments connecting world model representations, data composition, and fine-tuning recipes to physical success rates
- Adapt our policy recipe to partner hardware and new embodiments
- Own the deployment loop for learned policies (VLAs, diffusion policies,
Requirements
- You have personally deployed software on real robot hardware and iterated to make it work - whether learned policies, motion planning, classical control, or perception-driven manipulation.
- You can walk through a specific system you shipped, what broke on the physical robot that didn't break in sim or testing, and how you fixed it.
- Comfort working at the intersection of software and physical systems: you can reconfigure a robot workspace and trace a policy failure in the same afternoon
Nice to have
- experience with video/multimodal generative models or world models
Compensation
- 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.
- In this case, we will communicate any updates in the expected salary range.
Benefits
- Diagnose real-world policy failures - determining whether the problem is data coverage, camera/proprioception mismatch, or execution - and partner with the research team to fix it at the right layer
- Bonus: direct experience deploying learned policies (VLAs, diffusion policies) on real hardware
Company info
- 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.
This listing is sourced directly from Runway's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.