Senior Platform Engineer: Storage

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Lead the development of Railway's block storage systems
• ▹Support the operation of storage systems and participate in on-call rotations
• ▹Drive the specification of storage server hardware
• ▹Build systems to support capacity planning
• ▹Design and build interfaces with orchestration services to support coordinated workflows such as online backups and zero-downtime live workload migration
• ▹Write Engineering Requirement Documents to take something from idea to defined tasks, implementation and monitoring its success
• ▹Set the longer-term architectural direction to scale the platform

Requirements

• ▹Meet one or more of the following requirements:
• ▹Built and operated distributed storage systems with a strong grasp of first principles
• ▹Strong systems engineering experience in one or more of: filesystems, block devices, kernel I/O paths, SPDK, io_uring, vhost-user-blk, ublk or virtualization
• ▹Deep understanding of the algorithms and techniques behind fast, performant and reliable storage systems
• ▹Experience building large distributed systems where consistency and availability were critical
• ▹Strong background in performance engineering at the I/O layer on Linux
• ▹Strong foundation in systems programming with Rust
• ▹Comfortable owning a problem alone at a small company
• ▹Solid intuition about how long solutions will last: in startups, 2-3 orders of magnitude, or 12-18 months
• ▹Grit to dive into a problem, implement a solution, scale it and replace it when needed
• ▹Communicate well enough to get your point across, your solution implemented and documented for when you are not around

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 let developers create, ship and operate software with minimal friction. It operates across multiple colocation datacenters and large fleets of cloud VMs. 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.