Senior Platform Engineer: Storage
Railway's mission is to let developers create, ship and operate software with minimal friction, built on rock-solid composable primitives, with storage being central. As a Storage Engineer you will build, evolve and operate the systems that allow Railway to host stateful workloads across multiple colocation datacenters and large fleets of cloud VMs, building high-availability primitives that work anywhere and can migrate between environments with minimal (ideally zero) downtime. The work centers on a new log-structured block-storage system designed for performance, high density and high availability across cloud and baremetal environments. Railway is a globally distributed startup of around 21 people serving hundreds of thousands of users. This is a global remote role.
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 for coordinated workflows such as on-line backups and zero-downtime/live workload migration
- ▹Write Engineering Requirement Documents to take work from idea to defined tasks, implementation and success monitoring
- ▹Set the longer-term architectural direction to scale the platform
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 are 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
- ▹Grit to dive into a problem, implement, scale and replace a solution when needed
- ▹Communicate well enough to get a point across, get the solution implemented and documented
Nice to have
- ▹Background in adjacent infrastructure such as hypervisor I/O, kernel development, distributed systems or persistent memory
Soft skills
What we offer
- ▹Great salary
- ▹Full health benefits including dependents
- ▹Strong equity grants
- ▹Equipment stipend
- ▹High-autonomy culture with very few meetings
- ▹High-ownership culture
- ▹Novel problems and solutions at a well-funded startup
- ▹Growth support, including helping you move on to your next area when ready