Senior Platform Engineer

Senior Platform Engineer

About

Rally is the User Research CRM that empowers product, design, and research teams to connect with users efficiently and securely. Our platform automates participant recruitment, outreach, screening, scheduling, consent, and incentives. We are building an AI-native platform for the end-to-end research recruiting lifecycle. Rally is trusted by leading companies and backed by prominent investors. The Platform Engineering team is a small, high-ownership group focused on the reliability, scalability, and developer experience of Rally's core backend systems.

Responsibilities

• Own and scale critical backend systems, including data sync pipelines, search APIs, email/SMS delivery, and workflow automation, with a focus on reliability and operational excellence.
• Drive platform-level projects to unlock new product capabilities such as activity feeds, custom objects, rate limiting, tenant isolation, and data enrichment integrations.
• Collaborate with product engineers to identify and eliminate platform bottlenecks, improving feature development velocity and reliability.
• Participate in the shared platform on-call rotation and lead post-incident reviews to enhance system observability and resilience.
• Help shape the backend foundation for Rally’s AI-native platform, ensuring core systems can support AI agents running research workflows at scale.
• Influence architectural decisions and establish engineering standards across the backend stack.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, technical design discussions, and day-to-day pairing.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience building and operating complex backend systems in production, ideally in a startup or high-ownership environment.
• Strong TypeScript/Node.js fundamentals with hands-on experience in a fully TypeScript codebase.
• Deep experience with AWS managed services (ECS/Fargate, RDS/Aurora, MSK) and modern cloud-native architecture patterns.
• Experience with event-driven systems and streaming infrastructure (Kafka or equivalent).
• Proven track record of owning significant technical areas end-to-end.
• Strong understanding of observability (metrics, logs, traces) and comfort with on-call responsibilities and production incident response.
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset.
• Familiarity with workflow orchestration systems (e.g., Temporal) or distributed systems patterns is a plus.
• Experience with Elasticsearch or similar search infrastructure at scale is a plus.
• Exposure to AI-native product development or agentic workflow patterns is a plus.
• Work style: Remote-first within the United States.
• Base salary range: $185,000 – $210,000 USD per year, plus variable compensation (equity awards).