Senior Backend Engineer

About Runway

Runway is a collaborative business planning platform designed to make business intuitively understandable for everyone.

Our Mission: To make business accessible and understandable to everyone. We believe that teams that understand the “why” behind their work are more productive and make better decisions. True alignment and collaboration come from having a shared source of truth that everyone understands.

Our Approach: Runway replaces traditional spreadsheets with a modern planning platform that brings clarity and context to business operations for all teams — not just finance. Just as Figma made design accessible across the organization, Runway does the same for business planning.

Why It Matters: Understanding requires more than just access to numbers; real collaboration happens when teams see how their work fits into the bigger picture. By providing this context, Runway helps teams save time and move faster.

Our Customers: World-class companies like AngelList, Superhuman, Stability.AI, ConvertKit, Lambda Labs, Lob, and SandboxVR rely on Runway to run their businesses more efficiently.

Our Investors: We are supported by a select group of investors that we admire, including Garry Tan (YC & Initialized), a16z, Elad Gil, Naval Ravikant, Dylan Field (founder of Figma), Eric Ries, Claire Hughes Johnson (COO of Stripe), Henry Ward (founder of Carta), Akshay Kothari (COO of Notion), Eugene Wei, Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier, Scott Belsky, Soleio Cuervo, Balaji Srinivasan, and many others.

Working at Runway

We're remote-first, so you can work from anywhere in North America. We strive to be clear in our communication and over-communicate by default.

It’s early in our journey, so you'll have an opportunity to shape not just our product, but the company itself: how we work together, what makes us stand out, and who we hire.

Below are the values we share as a team — if these resonate with you, you may enjoy working here. (And if you don't like them, please tell us what we're missing in our thinking!)

Our Values

• 💩 Give a Shit: Giving a shit can’t be taught. It’s an inner drive that compels you to do what’s right and do it well. Have passion, take pride, and care deeply about your impact.

• 💡 Create Clarity: Cut through ambiguity and reveal the truth. Start with why, then answer how and what. Treat problems like puzzles, dig deeper, and find the right path.

• 🤝 Build Trust: With trust, it’s safe to take risks. We get there by being open, honest, and accountable. Actively listen, speak your mind, and consistently show up.

• ✨ Raise the Bar: Scrap the status quo and push yourself to create something that wows. Get others excited to do the same. Iterate, elevate, and don’t stop moving forward.

What you’ll do

• Build product & infrastructure: As an early engineer, you’ll play a key role in shaping the architectural decisions that allow Runway to scale to meet the needs of our growing customer base. We’re looking for folks excited to have a big impact on our core infrastructure and approach to devops at Runway. You'll also work closely with the design and PM teams to plan and implement our core product.

• Build our technical foundation: Work we do today can make our future work better and faster. Since our product is tackling a complex problem, we’ll need to build a foundation that is flexible and allows us to adapt to a wide variety of product needs.

• Grow the team: Everyone on the early team plays an important role in attracting, closing, and growing other talented team members. The biggest factor in our ability to build amazing products is the team, so we look to you to help set the example for the kind of team we all want to build together.

What you could work on

• Building a formula evaluation and query engine that allows customers to scale beyond any spreadsheet

• Supporting an integrations platform with hundreds of connections and the ability to query millions of rows of data

• Enabling customers to flexibly and joyfully create financial models using data from any part of their business

• Scaling our infrastructure to support the future growth of Runway

We’d love to hear from if you have…

• 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience - We’re looking for somebody comfortable with taking on senior-level work out of the gate. Staff-level experience is a plus.

• A track record of building robust, scalable systems - We’re always seeking the right balance between moving fast and building for the long haul. We're looking for someone who has thrived at tackling complex technical challenges in fast-paced environments.

• An ownership mindset - At Runway, we position our team to understand customer problems, and give them the autonomy to find the best path forward.

• Pride in your craft - We’re looking for people who take pride in their work and are always looking to improve it. If our work doesn’t matter to us, we won’t end up mattering to our customers.

• An inclusive approach to your work - We’re looking for somebody who loves to collaborate cross-functionally to achieve great customer outcomes and who is excited to contribute to our culture.

Bonus Points

• Leading a team working on a large web application

• Expertise in Go

• Experience or interest in DevOps and the infrastructure side of building great software products

• Experience with Kubernetes or Google Cloud Platform

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The base salary range for this full-time position is $190,000-$230,000 + generous early employee equity + benefits. The range displayed in this job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salary for this position. Within the range, individual pay is determined by various factors, including job-related skills (as uncovered during the interview process), experience, and relevant education or training. Please note that the compensation details listed in this posting reflect the base salary only, and do not include equity, benefits, or potential performance related bonuses.