Member of Technical Staff, Robotics Engineer

Member of Technical Staff, Robotics Engineer

Runway is hiring a robotics engineer in New York to connect its world models to physical robots, part of the company's push from video generation into general-purpose simulation.

$270,000 – $370,000 / yr

Location

New York, NY

On-site

Seniority

—

Compared with 15 other Research roles:
Common across similar roles Unique to this role

What you'll do

• 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
• 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
• 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 Common
• Partner with research to run controlled experiments connecting world model representations, data composition, and fine-tuning recipes to physical success rates Common
• Define and run physical evaluation protocols so results are trustworthy and comparable across policy iterations
• Adapt our policy recipe to partner hardware and new embodiments Unique

What you'll need

• 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. Unique
• Fluency in the software-to-robot interface: action/command spaces, control frequencies, observation pipelines, calibration, and how each affects real-world behavior
• 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 Unique
• Bonus: direct experience deploying learned policies (VLAs, diffusion policies) on real hardware; experience with video/multimodal generative models or world models Common