Platform Engineer

About the Role This role is about building and maintaining Railway's internal platform for provisioning, scheduling, and operating the fleet of compute resources. It is a high-impact, internal-facing role that enables other engineers to work efficiently and with high leverage. What You'll Do

• Build and maintain our host provisioning stack: PXE boot, Ansible, and burn-in agents to bring new bare metal online quickly and confidently.
• Utilize industry-standard orchestration (Kubernetes) and evolve our homegrown orchestration engine to manage clusters, containers, and VMs through a single lens.
• Optimize bin packing to maximize utilization/performance and minimize costs.
• Own internal tooling that Railway engineers use to interact with our fleet daily.
• Build out internal observability and alerting so we catch fleet problems before customers.
• Design and maintain CI pipelines that ship our 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 ideas from concept to defined tasks, implementation, and monitoring success. What We're Looking For
• A strong understanding of distributed systems and what it takes to operate them; experience building fault-tolerant, resilient, and scalable services, and care about failures at 3am.
• Hands-on experience with bare metal provisioning, configuration management, and getting hardware production-ready.
• Comfort building and operating internal tools; you understand developer experience inside the company matters as much as the product outside it.
• A solid intuition about how long your solutions will last; in startups, 2-3 orders of magnitude or 12-18 months is a reasonable horizon.
• The tact to implement solutions, create monitors for error boundaries, and document requirements when you're not around.
• A great sense of direction and prioritization amid ambiguity of an early-stage startup.
• Grit to dive into problems, implement solutions, scale, and replace when needed.
• Strong communication skills for articulating ideas, solutions, and outcomes. Compensation & Benefits
• Great salary, full health benefits including dependents, strong equity grants, equipment stipend, and more. For details, check the main careers page.
• Autonomy: Very few meetings; time is sacred.
• Ownership: High ownership and autonomy; you’ll shape the company over years.
• Novel problems/solutions: Work on well-funded startup with cool problems; opportunities for creative, high-leverage solutions.
• Growth: We support your growth and help you land in areas you want to develop as Railway grows.