Senior Infra Engineer: Baremetal Orchestration

Railway; United States; Remote; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Great salary

Full health benefits including dependents

Strong equity grants

Equipment stipend

High ownership culture

Support for personal growth

Job summary

Railway is seeking a highly skilled engineer to build and maintain provisioning tools that empower software engineers. The role is focused on enhancing our internal infrastructure, with responsibilities that include optimizing performance, developing internal tools and observability systems, and creating resilient services in Golang and Rust. Candidates should have a strong understanding of distributed systems, hands-on experience with bare metal provisioning, and excellent communication skills. The position offers a high degree of autonomy and ownership, with best-in-class benefits.

Qualifications

• Strong understanding of distributed systems and fault-tolerant architectures.
• Experience with bare metal provisioning and configuration management.
• Ability to build and operate internal tools focusing on developer experience.
• Intuition about system longevity in start-up environments.
• Skills in implementing solutions with proper monitoring.
• Ability to prioritize and navigate ambiguity in startups.
• Grit to tackle problems and iterate on solutions.
• Strong communication skills for effective collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain host provisioning stack using PXE boot and Ansible.
• Evolve orchestration engine for managing clusters and containers.
• Optimize bin packing algorithm to enhance performance and reduce costs.
• Own tooling for Railway engineers to facilitate their work.
• Develop internal observability and alerting systems.
• Design CI pipelines for infrastructure code.
• Implement infrastructure using Terraform and Ansible.
• Develop GRPC services in Golang/Rust.

Skills

Distributed systems

Bare metal provisioning

Configuration management

Internal tools development

Communication skills

Tools

Golang

Rust

Terraform

Ansible

Job description

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.

Many infrastructure platforms simply focus on how you deploy your singular application, and now how these applications function in concert. Questions like “How do you build systems for zero downtime deployment”, “How do you do service‑to‑service communications”, etc are usually left up to the engineers to define.

At Railway, our goal is to be an all encompassing solution to all these problems. As such, we take special care as we define our networking infrastructure.

“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

About the role

• 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 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.

About you

• A strong understanding of distributed systems and what it takes to operate them. You enjoy building fault‑tolerant, resilient, and scalable services, and you care about what happens when they break at 3am
• 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. You understand that developer experience inside the company matters as much as the product outside it
• 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, 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

Benefits and perks

At Railway, we provide best in class benefits. Great salary, full health benefits including dependents, strong equity grants, equipment stipend, and much more.

Beyond compensation, there are a few things that we believe that make working at Railway truly unique:

• 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.