Software Engineer (Infrastructure)

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and scalability of our backend systems, including Postgres, job queues, OpenSearch, Redis, and the data pipelines that move events between customer integrations and our product.
• Scale our infrastructure from tens of thousands of jobs to orders of magnitude more, ahead of customer demand rather than behind it.
• Make the tradeoffs that determine whether infra work takes weeks or months. We need someone who knows when to ship the duct-tape fix that buys six months and when to invest in the rewrite that buys five years.
• Set the bar for reliability, observability, and operational excellence. You decide what "production-ready" means at Centralize.
• Partner with Will on architecture decisions and with product engineers on the systems they build on top of yours.

Requirements

• Day 30: First major scalability win shipped, with measurable impact on throughput, latency, or cost.
• Day 60: Owning the on-call rotation, observability stack, and capacity planning for our core systems.
• Day 180: Our infrastructure handles 10x the load it does today, and you're already planning for the next 10x.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience owning and scaling fast-growing production systems that process millions of events per day and hundreds of millions of writes. We need someone who has lived through the hard growth phases, not someone who has read about them.
• Deep expertise in Postgres at scale, including query optimization, indexing strategy, replication, and the failure modes you only learn the hard way.
• Strong fluency with job queue infrastructure, AWS, OpenSearch, and Redis. You know where each one shines and where each one breaks.
• A sharp instinct for tradeoffs. Infra projects can take months. The best infra engineers know how to ship the 80% solution that captures most of the value in a fraction of the time, and how to recognize when the 100% solution is actually worth it.

Skills

• Excellent written and verbal English communication. You can document an architecture decision in a doc another engineer can read in five minutes.
• You want to work on infra at a company that already has it figured out. Centralize doesn't, and that's the point.
• You prefer to specialize in one layer of the stack. Our infra engineer touches Postgres, queues, search, cache, AWS, and the integration layer.
• You optimize for the perfect long-term solution at the expense of shipping. Infra at Centralize is graded on impact per week, not architectural elegance.
• You want a slower pace. We work hard and move quickly. Please only apply if that excites you.

Benefits

• Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k)
• Parental leave
• Unlimited PTO plus company holidays
• Quarterly offsite
• Equipment stipend

Pay

• $190,000 to $260,000 base salary depending on level, plus 0.20% to 0.40% equity. Final offer calibrated to seniority and experience.

Schedule

• This role is open to remote candidates in the US, with a strong preference for candidates based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco or New York City. Most of the team works in person, and remote hires should expect regular travel to one of the two hubs.