Senior Infra Engineer: Baremetal Orchestration

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

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 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

Detailed section about what we’re looking for in the person with bullet points.

• 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

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Benefits and perks