Infra Engineer - Datacenters

Department: Platform

Location: Remote (United States)

Employment Type: FullTime

This is a remote position available anywhere in the world! Linkedin makes us show a country, but we hire the best people wherever they are.

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

Expect to need all of these, day to day, to excel at Railway

1. Built application level code (Golang, GRPC, Postgres, etc)

2. Made use of OS primitives (syscalls, cgroups, etc)

3. Delivered projects 0→N. Lead it, scaled it, seen your “brilliant solutions” become tech debt, etc

4. Operated with agency and urgency (bonus points if remotely!)

5. Had enough foresight to ship for today, design for 10x, and engineer for 100x in 18mo

6. Communicated clearly using RFCs/Docs/etc to break up + deliver large, nebulous tasks

7. Been oncall and know that you will be 1-2 weeks per quarter

8. Constructed monitoring, alerts, and dashboards to notify you before things break

9. Built the confidence to say no to 99% of things, and the grit to deliver the 1% that matter

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

Expect to need all of these, day to day, to excel at Railway

1. Built application level code (Golang, GRPC, Postgres, etc)

2. Made use of OS primitives (syscalls, cgroups, etc)

3. Delivered projects 0→N. Lead it, scaled it, seen your “brilliant solutions” become tech debt, etc

4. Operated with agency and urgency (bonus points if remotely!)

5. Had enough foresight to ship for today, design for 10x, and engineer for 100x in 18mo

6. Communicated clearly using RFCs/Docs/etc to break up + deliver large, nebulous tasks

7. Been oncall and know that you will be 1-2 weeks per quarter

8. Constructed monitoring, alerts, and dashboards to notify you before things break

9. Built the confidence to say no to 99% of things, and the grit to deliver the 1% that matter

Desired Qualifications/Experience

Expect to go deep in 1-2 of these to do the best work of your life

1. Designed and procured $1m+ hardware for datacenters

2. Managed and orchestrated supply chains globally

3. Designed rack level layouts for optimal efficiency (heat/energy/etc)

4. 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

At Railway, we provide best in class benefits. Great salary, full health benefits including dependents, strong equity grants, equipment stipend, and much more. For more details, check back on the main careers page.

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.

How we hire

No tricks. No surprises. Here's the entire process:

1. Talk with us about the role

   • This is completely open ended and we're just trying to see who you are, what you want to do, and where you wanna go.

2. Work on a small project to discuss in the interview

   • Asynchronously implement the following:

   • Pre-interview: Design a datacenter procurement, buildout, and management process from scratch

   • You can, and SHOULD! ask us questions ahead of time.

3. Review your solution with the Team

   1. You'll sit down with someone on the team and go over the above. We'll poke into your solution, as well as get you acquainted with two more members of the team.

      1. Looking for: Learn about your problem solving skills. How you break down a problem and how you present a solution.

   2. Interview Structure (60 Minutes):

      1. Pre-work (before your interview): Complete your solution (advised)

      2. 0-5m: introduction

      3. 5-50m: Building (or expanding) your solution

      4. 50-60m: Questions on Railway/Tech/etc

4. Meet the Team

   1. You'll meet the Team, which will be comprised of 4 people from vastly different sections of the company.

      1. Looking for: How you work with the rest of the team and communicate.

5. Offer and Details Chat with CEO

   1. Finally, we will go over the process, the role, and hammer out the details about your position, onboarding, and all the deets.

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