Infra Engineer – Datacenters

Railway; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Autonomy

Ownership

Novel problems

Growth

Job summary

Railway is building foundational data and infrastructure to ship products rapidly. This role focuses on backend systems, reliability, and performance across distributed datacenters. You will own and improve core services written in Golang, GRPC, and Postgres, with a strong emphasis on scalability and resilience.

We operate globally with a remote-first mindset. You’ll collaborate across teams, ship for today while planning for 10x growth, and own critical incidents, monitoring, and dashboards to

Qualifications

• Built application level code using Golang, GRPC, and Postgres.
• Used OS primitives such as syscalls and cgroups.
• Led projects, scaled solutions, and managed tech debt over time.
• Operated with agency and urgency; remote experience a plus.
• Committed to shipping today while designing for 10x in 18 months.
• Communicated clearly using RFCs and documentation.

Skills

Golang

GRPC

PostgreSQL

Syscalls

Cgroups

On-call

RFCs & Docs

Scalable design

Job description

At Railway, we make it simple to ship anything. A lot goes into that. This role bridges the universe of atoms, to the universe of bits.

We’ve built ground up infrastructure to deliver better-than-best-in-class experience to all of our users, by building datacenters all over the world.

They’re designed for performance of course, but also for resilience and reliability. Doesn’t matter how good your stuff is if it doesn’t stay up right?

"The person who says it cannot be done, should not interrupt the person doing it"

– Confucius

Curious? Learn more in our blog post about this team and the great work they’re doing: So You Want to Build Your Own Data Center

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 (1 and 2 and 3).

Required Qualifications/Experience

• Built application level code (Golang, GRPC, Postgres, etc)
• Made use of OS primitives (syscalls, cgroups, etc)
• Delivered projects 0N. Lead 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 oncall 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

• Designed and procured $1m+ hardware for datacenters
• Managed and orchestrated supply chains globally
• Designed rack level layouts for optimal efficiency (heat/energy/etc)
• Built automated systems for inventory management up to PXE bootstrapping

We value and love to work with diverse persons from all backgrounds.

Things to know

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. As a result, stuff is ALWAYS happening.

We do NOT expect you to work all the time, but you’ll have to be diligent about your boundaries because the end of your day may overlap with the start of someone else’s.

We’re a small team, with high ownership, who are not only passionate about what we do, but seek to be exceptional as well. At the time of writing we’re 21, serving hundreds of thousands of users. There’s a lot of stuff going on, and a lot of ambiguity.

We want you to own it. We believe that ownership is a key to growth, and part of that growth is not only being able to make the choices, but owning the success, or failure, that comes with those choices.

Benefits and perks

• Autonomy: We have very few meetings. Just a Monday and a Friday to go over the Company Board. We think your time is sacred, whether it’s at work, or outside of work.
• Ownership: We’re a company with a high ownership, high autonomy culture. We hope that you’ll come in, help us, and over the course of many years do the best work of your life. When we bring you onboard, we expect you to change the company.
• Novel problems/solutions: We’re a startup that’s well funded, with cool problems, which lets us implement novel solutions! We abhor "busywork" and think, whether it’s community, engineering, operations, etc there’s always opportunity for creative and high leverage solutions.
• Growth: We want you to grow with us, but we know that talent is loaned, so when you figure out what area you want to grow in next, whether it’s at Railway or outside, we’ll make sure you land there.