Senior Infra Engineer: Baremetal Orchestration

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Build and maintain the host provisioning stack: PXE boot, Ansible and burn-in agents that bring new bare metal online quickly and confidently
• ▹Evolve the homegrown orchestration engine to manage clusters, containers and VMs through a single lens
• ▹Optimize the efficiency of the bin packing algorithm to maximize utilization and performance and minimize costs
• ▹Own the internal tooling Railway engineers use to interact with the fleet every day
• ▹Build internal observability and alerting to catch fleet problems before customers feel them
• ▹Design and maintain the CI pipelines that ship infrastructure code safely
• ▹Define infrastructure that can be torn down, failed over and reconstituted from scratch using immutable infrastructure principles with 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, implementation and monitoring its success

Requirements

• ▹Strong understanding of distributed systems and what it takes to operate them
• ▹Enjoy building fault tolerant, resilient and scalable services, and care about what happens when they break at 3am
• ▹Hands-on experience with bare metal provisioning, configuration management and getting hardware production-ready
• ▹Comfort building and operating internal tools
• ▹Solid intuition about how long solutions will last: in startups, 2-3 orders of magnitude, or 12-18 months
• ▹The tact to implement a solution, create monitors for its error boundaries and document requirements for when you are not around
• ▹Great sense of direction and prioritization amid the ambiguity of an early-stage startup
• ▹Grit to dive into a problem, implement a solution, scale it and replace it when needed
• ▹Great communication skills

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Great salary
• ▹Full health benefits including dependents
• ▹Strong equity grants
• ▹Equipment stipend
• ▹Very few meetings: just Monday and Friday
• ▹High autonomy and ownership

About the company

Railway's mission is to make software engineers higher leverage, offering an all-encompassing solution from deployment to service-to-service communication. It is a globally distributed startup with a small, high-ownership team: 21 people at the time of writing, serving hundreds of thousands of users.