Engineering Manager, API

About the Role

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the team responsible for Runway's product platform and API. You should have experience growing high-performing engineering teams and be deeply interested in the intersection of product development, APIs, and distributed systems. You will manage our current and growing team of 5.

You'll have a chance to work closely with our product engineering, product management, and finance teams to build low-latency, high-reliability APIs for our AI-powered creation tools as well as the infrastructure to support them.

Our API endpoints for real-time collaboration and media asset management is written in Type Script , and runs in ECS containers on AWS Fargate. We leverage multiple AWS-native components, such as S3, Cloud Front, Lambda, Kinesis, and SQS, as building blocks of our infrastructure.

Our inference backend is written in Python (PyTorch, Torch Script), and is deployed across multiple clusters / cloud providers. We use Kubernetes for container orchestration, and k8s-native components such as Flyte, Kueue, and Kyverno efficient job orchestration. We invest in prometheus and grafana for monitoring, and Terraform to manage our infrastructure.

• Drive platform strategy and architecture for our Type Script-based API infrastructure, ensuring code quality, maintainability, and scalability as we grow
• Own the public API domain end-to-end
  , from technical architecture to revenue growth, ensuring it's a high-quality, revenue-generating platform that developers love
• Manage our data and analytics infrastructure
  , ensuring data integrity, security, and accessibility for teams across the company
• Lead and grow a team of 4-6 platform engineers
  , fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement
• Partner with Product Engineering teams to unblock new feature launches, providing platform support and ensuring smooth integration between frontend experiences and backend capabilities
• Own critical data pipelines and metrics that power business decisions across Finance (cost-of-sales, revenue attribution), Support (usage analytics, error tracking), and Product (feature adoption, performance metrics)
• Work cross-functionally with leadership to set priorities, communicate progress, and align platform investments with business goals

• 2+ years of experience in an engineering manager or team lead role
  , with a track record of building and scaling high-performing teams
• 5+ years of hands-on engineering experience
  , with specific expertise operating Type Script services in the cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Strong product sensibility and business acumen - you understand how technical decisions impact revenue, customer satisfaction, and company metrics
• Experience owning revenue-generating platforms or products
  , with an understanding of API economics, usage-based pricing, and developer experience
• Solid foundation in data engineering and analytics
  , including experience with metrics pipelines, data modeling, and business intelligence tooling
• Database expertise
  , particularly in managing production databases at scale, data migrations, and ensuring data integrity
• Excellent cross-functional communication skills - you can translate technical concepts for business teams, explain business constraints to engineers, and build consensus across diverse stakeholders
• Comfort with ambiguity and rapid iteration - you can make smart trade-offs between perfect and good-enough in a fast-moving startup environment
• Empathetic and inclusive leadership style that empowers engineers to do their best work