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.