Senior Infra Engineer: Baremetal Orchestration

Job description

Our core mission at Railway is to make software engineers higher leverage. We believe that people should be given powerful tools so that they can spend less time setting up to do, and more time doing.

Many infrastructure platforms simply focus on how you deploy your singular application, and now how these applications function in concert. Questions like “How do you build systems for zero downtime deployment”, “How do you do service-to-service communications”, etc are usually left up to the engineers to define.

At Railway, our goal is to be an all encompassing solution to all these problems. As such, we take special care as we define our networking infrastructure.

“But the world would be a better place if more engineers, like me, hated technology. The stuff I design, if I'm successful, nobody will ever notice. Things will just work, and will be self-managing”

- Radia Perlman

About the role

For this role, you will:

• Build and maintain our host provisioning stack: PXE boot, Ansible, and burn-in agents that bring new bare metal online quickly and confidently

• Continue to evolve our homegrown orchestration engine to manage clusters, containers, and VMs through a single lens

• Optimize the efficiency of our bin packing algorithm to maximize utilization/performance and minimize costs

• Own the internal tooling that Railway engineers use to interact with our fleet every day

• Build out internal observability and alerting so we catch fleet problems before customers feel them

• Design and maintain the CI pipelines that ship our infrastructure code safely

• Define infrastructure that can be torn down, failed over, and reconstituted from scratch using principle of immutable infrastructure using Terraform and Ansible

• Build Golang/Rust GRPC services from scratch capable of supporting millions of users

• Write Engineering Requirement Documents to take something from idea, to defined tasks, to implementation, to monitoring its success

The arc of this role is more internal-facing than user-facing. You're building the platform that Railway engineers run on. This is a high impact, high agency role with direct effect on company culture, trajectory, and outcome.

About you

• A strong understanding of distributed systems and what it takes to operate them. You enjoy building fault tolerant, resilient, and scalable services, and you care about what happens when they break at 3am

• Hands-on experience with bare metal provisioning, configuration management, and the unglamorous-but-critical work of getting hardware production-ready

• Comfort building and operating internal tools. You understand that developer experience inside the company matters as much as the product outside it

• A solid intuition about how long your solutions will last. All systems age. In startups, we can hope for 2-3 orders of magnitude, or 12-18mo

• The tact to implement your solution, create monitors for its error boundaries, and document any requirements for when you're not around

• A great sense of direction and prioritization when it comes to dealing with the ambiguity of an early stage startup

• A sense of grit to dive into a problem, implement a solution, scale that solution, and replace it when needed

• A great set of communication skills for getting your point across, solution implemented, and beyond

We value and love to work with diverse persons from all backgrounds

Things to know

For better or worse, we're a startup; our team dynamics are different from companies of different sizes and stages.

• We're distributed ALL across the globe, and that's only going to be more and more distributed. As a result, stuff is ALWAYS happening.

• We do NOT expect you to work all the time, but you'll have to be diligent about your boundaries because the end of your day may overlap with the start of someone else's.

• We're a small team, with high ownership, who are not only passionate about what we do, but seek to be exceptional as well. At the time of writing we're 21, serving hundreds of thousands of users. There's a lot of stuff going on, and a lot of ambiguity.

• We want you to own it. We believe that ownership is a key to growth, and part of that growth is not only being able to make the choices, but owning the success, or failure, that comes with those choices.

Benefits and perks

At Railway, we provide best in class benefits. Great salary, full health benefits including dependents, strong equity grants, equipment stipend, and much more. For more details, check back on the main careers page.

Beyond compensation, there are a few things that we believe that make working at Railway truly unique:

• Autonomy: We have very few meetings. Just a Monday and a Friday to go over the Company Board. We think your time is sacred, whether it's at work, or outside of work.

• Ownership: We're a company with a high ownership, high autonomy culture. We hope that you'll come in, help us, and over the course of many years do the best work of your life. When we bring you onboard, we expect you to change the company.

• Novel problems/solutions: We're a startup that's well funded, with cool problems, which lets us implement novel solutions! We abhor “busywork” and think, whether it's community, engineering, operations, etc there's always opportunity for creative and high leverage solutions.

• Growth: We want you to grow with us, but we know that talent is loaned, so when you figure out what area you want to grow in next, whether it's at Railway or outside, we'll make sure you land there.

How we hire

No tricks. No surprises. Here's the entire process.

1) Talk with us about the role

This is completely open ended and we're just trying to see who you are, what you want to do, and where you wanna go.

2) Work on a small project to discuss in the interview

Asynchronously implement the following:

• Imagine a theoretical or actual system like Railway which can manage stateless and stateful compute workloads. Design the engine for managing orchestration

• Interview Structure (60 Minutes):

• Pre-work (before your interview): Complete your solution (advised)

• 0-5m: introduction

• 5-50m: Building (or expanding) your solution

• 50-60m: Questions on Railway/Tech/etc

You can, and SHOULD! ask us questions ahead of time. Ask away!

3) Review your solution with the Team

You'll sit down with someone on the team and go over the above. We'll poke into your solution, as well as get you acquainted with two more members of the team.

Looking for: Learn about your problem solving skills. How you break down a problem and how you present a solution.

4) Meet the Team

You'll meet the Team, which will be comprised of 4 people from vastly different sections of the company.

Looking for: How you work with the rest of the team and communicate.

5) Chat with CEO

Sit down with our founder and CEO for 30 minutes. This is a 1:1, open ended conversation.

6) Offer call

Finally, we will present the offers, hammer out the details about your position, tee up onboarding, and start our journey together.

Final Note: The interview goes both ways. Once again, please ask us things. Many things! Hard things. That's what we're here for.