✨ AI Insights & Summary
Railway is seeking a Senior Infra Engineer: Platform to architect and build the core infrastructure that empowers software engineers globally. This role offers immense agency and impact, allowing you to shape the tools that scale Railway's operations and the company itself. If you excel at building distributed systems, possess deep technical expertise in infrastructure, and thrive in a high-ownership, fast-paced startup environment, this is an exceptional opportunity to contribute to the future of developer productivity.
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, you will be directly responsible for exposing the knobs, bells, and whistles that allow the users to build to their wildest dreams. The tools 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:
- Launch Week: Scale to Zero
- Data Center Build - Part One
- 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:
Required Qualifications/Experience
Expect to need all of these, day to day, to excel at Railway:
- Built application-level code (Golang, GRPC, Postgres, etc.).
- Made use of OS primitives (syscalls, cgroups, etc).
- Delivered projects 0→N. Led it, scaled it, seen your “brilliant solutions” become tech debt, etc.
- Operated with agency and urgency (bonus points if remotely!).
- Had enough foresight to ship for today, design for 10x, and engineer for 100x in 18mo.
- Communicated clearly using RFCs/Docs/etc to break up + deliver large, nebulous tasks.
- Been on-call and know that you will be 1-2 weeks per quarter.
- Constructed monitoring, alerts, and dashboards to notify you before things break.
- Built the confidence to say no to 99% of things, and the grit to deliver the 1% that matter.
Desired Qualifications/Experience
Expect to go deep in 1-2 of these to do the best work of your life:
- Baremetal Networking at 1T+ request/mo scale (eBGP/eBPF, L2-L7, Wireguard).
- Orchestration at 100m+ containers scale (Runtimes/Hypervisors, Live-migrations, Real-time operating system).
- Metrics/Logs/Traces at 1T request/mo scale (Vector, VictoriaMetrics, Clickhouse).
- Block storage, filesystems, replication at Petabyte/drive scale (ZFS, Ceph, VirtioFS).
- Efficient OCI build/transfer at TBps/sec scale (BuildKit, SOCI, Zot, overlayfs).
- Building “datacenters” (in quotes because closet server racks and HomeLabs count!).
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:
- Talk with us about the role: Open-ended conversation about who you are and what you want.
- Work on a small project: Asynchronously architect a Container Provisioning Engine for Railway.
- Review your solution with the Team: Discuss your solution and get acquainted with team members.
- Meet the Team: Meet 4 people from diverse sections of the company.
- Chat with CEO: A 30-minute 1:1 conversation with the founder.
- 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?