Senior Infra Engineer: Baremetal Orchestration
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.
Utilize industry standard orchestration (Kubernetes) as well as 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.
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.
Responsibilities
- Build and maintain our host provisioning stack: PXE boot, Ansible, and burn-in agents that bring new bare metal online quickly and confidently.
- Utilize industry standard orchestration (Kubernetes) as well as 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.
- 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.
Requirements
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.
You are comfortable 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.
Qualifications
For better or worse, we're a startup; our team dynamics are different from companies of different sizes and stages. We're globally distributed—and getting more so. Stuff is always happening somewhere.
We don't expect you to be online all the time, but you'll need to be diligent about your boundaries — 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, which means we rely on leverage—systems over coordination, judgment over process. Expect ambiguity and a fast-moving environment.
You'll own real outcomes. That means making decisions, not just executing—and owning the success, or failure, that comes with them.
Skills
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.
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
Great salary, full health benefits including dependents, strong equity grants, equipment stipend, and much more.
Pay
TBD
Schedule
TBD