Runway
Member of Technical Staff, Robotics Engineer
New York, NY · Staff+
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 51 days ago
Full-Stack DevelopmentRoboticsResearch
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
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
- Universal World Simulator https://runwayml.com/world-simulator.html
- GWM-1 https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-runway-gwm-1
- Gen-4.5 https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-runway-gen-4.5
- General World Models https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-general-world-models
- Robotics SDK https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-runway-gwm-1#robotics-section
- Conversational Real-time Agents https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-runway-gwm-1#avatars-section
- Runway Studios https://runwayml.com/studios
- 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
This listing is sourced directly from Runway's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.