Research Engineer (Robotics/AI)

TL;DR

Research Engineer (Robotics/AI): Building and deploying general-purpose world models for robotics with an accent on closing the loop between foundation models and real-world physical action. Focus on designing end-to-end robot learning pipelines, training policies, and physical evaluation on real hardware.

Location: Must be based in or willing to relocate to New York City

Salary: $270,000 – $370,000

Company

Runway is an AI research company building systems to simulate the world by merging art and science.

What you will do

• Design and execute end-to-end robot learning pipelines from task design to physical evaluation.
• Deploy and iterate on learned policies like VLAs and diffusion models on real robot hardware.
• Run controlled experiments to optimize world model representations and fine-tuning strategies.
• Build and maintain physical evaluation benchmarks, infrastructure, and hardware calibration.
• Coordinate robot data collection efforts across internal and external teams.
• Resolve bottlenecks across the robotics stack including data, training infrastructure, and hardware.

Requirements

• Hands-on robotics experience spanning data collection, model training, and physical evaluation.
• Direct experience with modern learned policies on real hardware.
• Strong intuition for the full robot learning lifecycle.
• Proficiency with at least one ML framework such as PyTorch or JAX.
• Ability to work across software, hardware, and physical systems.
• Must be based in or willing to relocate to the NYC area.

Nice to have

• Experience with video or multimodal generative models.
• Experience with world models or foundation model representations for downstream control.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive compensation package with pay equity focus.
• Opportunity to work at the frontier of AI and robotics research.
• Collaborative environment with creative and ambitious team members.
• Commitment to diversity, inclusion, and equal opportunity.