Design Engineer

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 are looking for a passionate Design Engineer to join Runway Labs — our research and exploration team pushing the frontier of AI video and General World Models. This is not a role focused on Runway core consumer products; instead, you’ll be embedded in a fast-moving lab environment where the work is exploratory, experimental, and technical.

This candidate should be a motivated self-starter with experience working closely with engineering and research teams to rapidly prototype and ship. You'll explore new interfaces and interaction paradigms for AI generated video, world models, and agentic systems helping translate cutting-edge research into tangible, usable experiences.

This role requires a blend of design skills and technical expertise, along with a genuine passion for both. As part of a small team, you’ll collaborate with researchers, engineers, and product designers to develop concept prototypes, design high-value interactive features, and build tools that enable new creative and research workflows.

What you’ll do

• Prototype and implement novel user experiences at the intersection of AI video, world models, and emerging generative media

• Design and build agentic tools and interfaces that allow researchers and creatives to interact with and direct AI systems in real time

• Explore new application areas for AI video and general world models — from simulation and interactive media to research tooling

• Stretch the limits of front-end engineering to broaden what’s possible in research and experimentation contexts

• Create internal tools and frameworks used across design and engineering teams at Runway Labs

• Work alongside researchers, engineers, and product designers to shape how we think about the future of AI-driven creativity

What you’ll need

• Genuine curiosity about AI video, world models, agentic engineering and generative media and an intuition for how to design meaningful interactions with these systems

• Experience designing flows, prototypes, and high-fidelity UIs for web and agentic products

• Experience building agentic tools or interfaces — i.e., systems where AI takes actions, reasons over state, or drives multi-step workflows

• Strong understanding of visual and interaction design, as well as usability testing

• Comfort working in ambiguous, research oriented environments where the problem space is still being defined

• Strong understanding of visual and interaction design, as well as usability testing.

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