Senior Infra Engineer: Compute

About the Role

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. Note: Networking falls under the platform engineering umbrella. If you’re specialized, we’d love to chat! That said, we’d also like it noted you’re probably going to do a lot of non-networking + platform things.

About the Role (Specifics)

• Write eBPF programs to perform sidecar-less routing.
• Leverage Linux 5.0/6.0 features for userspace block storage device management.
• Utilize flamegraphs to identify performance bottlenecks and design systems to remove them.
• Write Engineering Requirement Documents (ERDs) to guide projects from idea to implementation and monitoring.
• Interface with the Golang/GRPC microservice stack and the Envoy routing layer.
• This is a high-impact, high-agency role with direct effect on company culture, trajectory, and outcome.

About You

• Strong understanding of distributed systems; enjoyment in building fault-tolerant, resilient, and scalable services.
• Solid intuition about system longevity and the tact to implement solutions, monitor error boundaries, and document future requirements.
• Great sense of direction and prioritization in an early-stage startup environment.
• Grit to dive into problems, implement, scale, and replace solutions as needed.
• Excellent communication skills for conveying ideas, implementing solutions, and collaborating.
• We value and love to work with diverse persons from all backgrounds.

Things to Know

• We are a globally distributed startup, which means time zones can vary. Diligence with boundaries is key, as your end-of-day will overlap with someone else's start.
• We are a small, high-ownership team deeply committed to exceptional work.
• We are scaling quickly, relying on systems over coordination and judgment over process.
• Expect ambiguity and a fast-moving environment where you will own real outcomes and make decisions.

Benefits and Perks

• Great salary.
• Full health benefits including dependents.
• Strong equity grants.
• Equipment stipend.
• Autonomy: Very few meetings, focused on a Monday and Friday Company Board review.
• Ownership: High-ownership, high-autonomy culture where you are expected to help change the company over many years.
• Novel problems/solutions: Well-funded startup with opportunities for creative and high-leverage solutions.
• Growth: Support for professional growth, both within Railway and beyond.

How We Hire

1. Talk with us about the role: Open-ended conversation about you, your goals, and aspirations.
2. Work on a small project: Asynchronously implement a solution for a compute management system design, followed by an interview discussion.
3. Review your solution with the Team: Technical discussion focusing on problem-solving skills and solution presentation.
4. Meet the Team: Introduction to team members from various departments to assess collaboration and communication.
5. Chat with CEO: 1:1 conversation with the founder and CEO.
6. Offer call: Finalizing offer details and onboarding.

• The interview process is reciprocal; ask many questions.

Location

Remote (anywhere)