RU

Applied Research Lead, Model Scaling

Runway
Posted onFeb 23, 2026
LocationNew York, New York, United States | San Francisco, California, United States | Seattle, Washington, United States | London, England, United Kingdom | Tel Aviv-Yafo, Tel Aviv District, Israel or Remote (North America + 1 more)
Employment typeFull-time
Salary$280k – $380k Yearly

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.

About the role

*Open to hiring remote across North America and Europe — we also have offices in NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, London, and Tel Aviv

We’re looking for a Sr. Applied Research Scientist to lead efforts in pretraining the next generation of Runway’s multimodal models. This role is for someone who has a strong background building impactful and novel machine learning projects, has strong software engineering skills, and is deeply interested in seeing their research materialize in novel user interfaces for creative tasks.

What you’ll need

  • 4+ years of relevant ML engineering or research experience
  • Very strong programming skills and ability to write clean and maintainable research code
  • Deep interest in building human-in-the-loop systems for creativity
  • Passion for seeing research through from initial conception to eventual application
  • Experience mentoring and teaching other researchers
  • Strong communication, collaboration, and documentation skills

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.

Salary range: $280,000-$380,000 

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

We're excited to be recognized as a best place to work Crain's | InHerSight | BuiltIn NYC | INC

Runway is an applied AI research company building foundational General World Models that simulate all possible worlds and experiences, empowering creators through cutting-edge generative AI tools for video, image, and content creation.

Similar jobs

You might also be interested in...

LA4d

Applied Research Engineer

Labelbox

San Francisco, California, United States (Hybrid)

$250k – $300k Yearly

OP1w

Research Engineer / Research Scientist - Foundations Retrieval Lead

OpenAI

San Francisco, California, United States (Hybrid)

$460k – $555k Yearly

CE5d

Principal ML Investigator

Cerebras

Sunnyvale, California, United States (On-site)

PE2w

AI Research Lead

Perplexity

San Francisco, California, United States (On-site)

$300k – $470k Yearly

AN5d

Research Engineer, Pretraining Scaling

Anthropic

San Francisco, California, United States (On-site)

$315k – $560k Yearly