Senior Infra Engineer: Storage

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. Building the infrastructure which powers the Railway engine is the most core problem at Railway. As an infrastructure engineer working on storage, you will be directly responsible for designing software and hardware to back performant, high reliability block storage and object storage systems backing millions of applications. The solutions you build will be instrumental in not only scaling internal operations, but scaling the company to infinity and beyond!

“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

Curious? Here are 3 blog posts that dive into exciting projects this team has worked on:

1. Launch Week: Scale to Zero
2. Data Center Build - Part One
3. Data Center Build - Part Two

Want to learn about our work culture? Here is a three-part blog series that will help you see the unique ways our team works:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

About the Role

You will:

• Design and evolve multiple production Ceph clusters, from hardware design, to driving network requirements to configuring, tuning and operating clusters and their clients.
• Create efficient, generalizable APIs using systems/kernel features to provide safe, as-fast-as-possible live-migrations of stateful workload between hosts.
• Design and build API and Orchestration services to tie storage primitives to higher level primitives using Go, gRPC, ScyllaDB and Temporal.
• Write Engineering Requirement Documents to take something from idea, to defined tasks, to implementation, to monitoring its success.
• Design and build a suite of storage primitives that can be used by customer applications, internal services and enable higher level platform features such as streaming image pulls or movable build caches.

This is a high impact, high agency role with direct effect on company culture, trajectory, and outcome.

About You

We're looking for someone with:

• Experience architecting and implementing distributed systems. You enjoy building fault-tolerant, resilient, and scalable services.
• Production experience with distributed block device systems (e.g., Ceph) or a solid understanding of network storage cluster design from first principles.
• Understanding and experience with current-gen filesystems (Ext4, ZFS, BTRFS). Bonus points for next-gen (EROFS, bcachefs).
• 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, creator 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

• We're a globally distributed startup. Expect things to be always happening somewhere.
• We don't expect you to be online all the time, but diligent about your boundaries is key as your end of day will overlap with someone else's start.
• We're a small, high-ownership team that cares deeply about doing exceptional work.
• We're scaling quickly, relying on systems over coordination and judgment over process.
• Expect ambiguity and a fast-moving environment. You'll own real outcomes and make decisions.

Benefits and Perks

• Great salary
• Full health benefits including dependents
• Strong equity grants
• Equipment stipend
• And much more!

Beyond compensation, working at Railway offers:

• Autonomy: Very few meetings; just a Monday and Friday Company Board sync. Your time is sacred.
• Ownership: High ownership, high autonomy culture. We expect you to help change the company.
• Novel problems/solutions: Well-funded startup with cool problems allowing for novel solutions. We abhor “busywork”.
• Growth: We want you to grow with us and will support your next career move, whether at Railway or elsewhere.

How We Hire

No tricks. No surprises. The process includes:

1. Talk with us about the role: Open-ended conversation about who you are and what you want.
2. Work on a small project: Asynchronously design a Storage Engine for Railway's Volumes.
3. Review your solution with the Team: Discuss your solution and get acquainted with team members.
4. Meet the Team: Meet 4 people from diverse sections of the company.
5. Chat with CEO: A 30-minute 1:1 conversation with the founder.
6. Offer call: Finalize details and prepare for onboarding.

The interview goes both ways. Ask us anything!

Apply for this position

• Name
• Email
• Resume
• Why Railway?