Senior Infra Engineer: Baremetal Orchestration

Role Description

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 the 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.

Qualifications

A strong understanding of distributed systems and what it takes to operate them.

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.

A solid intuition about how long your solutions will last.

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.

Requirements

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.

We do NOT expect you to work all the time, but you'll have to be diligent about your boundaries.

We're a small team, with high ownership, who are not only passionate about what we do, but seek to be exceptional as well.

We want you to own it. We believe that ownership is a key to growth.

Benefits

Great salary, full health benefits including dependents, strong equity grants, equipment stipend, and much more.

Autonomy: We have very few meetings.

Ownership: We're a company with a high ownership, high autonomy culture.

Novel problems/solutions: We're a startup that's well funded, with cool problems.

Growth: We want you to grow with us, but we know that talent is loaned.

How we hire

Talk with us about the role.

Work on a small project to discuss in the interview.

Review your solution with the Team.

Meet the Team.

Chat with CEO.

Offer call.

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