---
title: 'Senior Infra Engineer: Baremetal Orchestration at Railway'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-infra-engineer-baremetal-orchestration-railway-global-8p0h65kyv01z'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-13'
---

# Senior Infra Engineer: Baremetal Orchestration at Railway

- **Company:** Railway
- **Location:** Global
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-05-08
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/railway/d93c8794-6058-4295-83a0-092b05664f34

## Job description

Job description Our core mission at Railway is to make software engineers higher leverage. We believe that people should be given powerful tools so that they can spend less time setting up to do, and more time doing. Many infrastructure platforms simply focus on how you deploy your singular application, and now how these applications function in concert. Questions like “How do you build systems for zero downtime deployment”, “How do you do service-to-service communications”, etc are usually left up to the engineers to define. At Railway, our goal is to be an all encompassing solution to all these problems. As such, we take special care as we define our networking infrastructure. “But the world would be a better place if more engineers, like me, hated technology. The stuff I design, if I'm successful, nobody will ever notice. Things will just work, and will be self-managing”

- Radia Perlman

## About the role

For this role, you will:

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

The arc of this role is more internal-facing than user-facing. You're building the platform that Railway engineers run on. This is a high impact, high agency role with direct effect on company culture, trajectory, and outcome.

## About you

- A strong understanding of distributed systems and what it takes to operate them. You enjoy building fault tolerant, resilient, and scalable services, and you care about what happens when they break at 3am
- Hands-on experience with bare metal provisioning, configuration management, and the unglamorous-but-critical work of getting hardware production-ready
- Comfort building and operating internal tools. You understand that developer experience inside the company matters as much as the product outside it
- A solid intuition about how long your solutions will last. All systems age. In startups, we can hope for 2-3 orders of magnitude, or 12-18mo
- The tact to implement your solution, create monitors for its error boundaries, and document any requirements for when you're not around
- A great sense of direction and prioritization when it comes to dealing with the ambiguity of an early stage startup
- A sense of grit to dive into a problem, implement a solution, scale that solution, and replace it when needed
- A great set of communication skills for getting your point across, solution implemented, and beyond

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](https://railway.com/careers). 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:

- Imagine a theoretical or actual system like Railway which can manage stateless and stateful compute workloads. Design the engine for managing orchestration
- Interview Structure (60 Minutes):
- Pre-work (before your interview): Complete your solution (advised)
- 0-5m: introduction
- 5-50m: Building (or expanding) your solution
- 50-60m: Questions on Railway/Tech/etc

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

1. Review your solution with the Team 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. Looking for: Learn about your problem solving skills. How you break down a problem and how you present a solution.
2. Meet the Team You'll meet the Team, which will be comprised of 4 people from vastly different sections of the company. Looking for: How you work with the rest of the team and communicate.
3. Chat with CEO Sit down with our founder and CEO for 30 minutes. This is a 1:1, open ended conversation.
4. Offer call Finally, we will present the offers, hammer out the details about your position, tee up onboarding, and start our journey together. Final Note: The interview goes both ways. Once again, please ask us things. Many things! Hard things. That's what we're here for.

## About Railway

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Railway is a modern cloud platform that enables developers to deploy, scale, and monitor full-stack applications instantly with minimal configuration.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2020
- **Founders**: Not publicly named on main site, but leadership includes Jacob Cooper as key leader and Jitachi Garcia as Founding Designer.

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Cloud Infrastructure / Developer Tools / Software Development
- **Target Customers**: B2B & B2C — individual developers, startups, SMBs, and enterprises needing rapid deployment and scaling of web applications, servers, databases, and APIs.
- **Mission**: “To build the cloud computing stack that unburdens you, so you can focus more on what matters to you” — Railway Docs.

## Products & Services
- **Railway Platform (Core SaaS)**: A full-stack deployment platform that reads code repos, builds OCI-compliant images, and runs them on managed infrastructure (GCP). Supports all languages and frameworks via Docker or Railpack. Key features include git-native deployments, managed databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, etc.), automatic scaling, private networking, cron jobs, and built-in monitoring/logging. [docs.railway.com](https://docs.railway.com/platform/philosophy)
- **Railpack**: Railway’s proprietary build system that automatically analyzes code and generates optimized container images without requiring a Dockerfile.
- **App Sleeping**: A cost-optimization feature that sleeps inactive services to reduce usage costs.
- **Enterprise Plan**: Custom SLAs, dedicated support, incident management RCAs, and compliance features.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Financial Data**:
  - **Annual Revenue**: ~$1.0M (privately held; likely higher in 2025 given growth, but “Not publicly available” precise figure from 2025).
  - **Total Funding**: $20.0M raised across 2 rounds (Seed + Series A led by Redpoint in May 2022).
  - **Series B**: Led by TQ Ventures (amount undisclosed, but active as of 2025).
- **Notable Investors**: Redpoint (led Series A), TQ Ventures (led Series B), plus unnamed seed investors.
- **User / Customer Metrics**: 2,000,000+ registered users, 2,600+ businesses, supporting 650k+ active users 24/7 (as of May 2024). [blog.railway.com](https://blog.railway.com/p/how-we-work-volume-iii)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount: ~95 employees (+18.5% YoY as of mid-2025).
  - LinkedIn Followers: 21,712 (up 53.5% year-over-year).
  - Remote-first culture with 19 countries represented in the team.
  - Ship weekly, compound small wins.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Obsessive Developer Experience**: “Just works” philosophy — no need to change code, configure CI/CD, or manage servers. Strong emphasis on reducing friction for developers.
- **Autonomy & Leverage Culture**: Built to support 1B developers with a team of ≤100 people. Each engineer owns entire features end-to-end as a DRI (Directly Responsible Individual). Minimal management, maximum ownership. [blog.railway.com](https://blog.railway.com/p/how-we-work-volume-ii)
- **Lean, High-Performance Team**: Operates with ~20 core people serving 650k+ users, 24/7. Zero passengers — everyone contributes directly to product or infrastructure.
- **Strong Remote-First Operations**: Fully distributed async workflows. Daily wraps in Discord, weekly ship cycles, deep work blocked out (only 2 half-days of meetings per week).
- **“Kind but Direct” Culture**: Open, direct feedback in public channels. No politics. No silent PIPs.

## Strategic Focus
- **Product**: Continue scaling the platform to support more languages, services, and enterprise requirements—maintaining a “take what you need” philosophy (recommend other vendors when appropriate).
- **Infrastructure**: Build more automation and tooling to “leverage” the small team to support massive scale (e.g., horizontal scaling, persistent storage, private networking, Changesets).
- **Talent**: Hire “drivers who make us obsolete”—people who will own a domain and become irreplaceable subject matter experts, then rotate knowledge to prevent bus factor.
- **Community & Brand**: Strong open-source and developer community via blog, docs, and partner programs.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture of Extreme Ownership**: Engineers are empowered to own entire projects (feature design, coding, deployment, monitoring, customer support) with zero handholding. You will be the DRI for something important from day one.
- **Remote-First & Async**: Fully remote globally, with optional team retreats twice a year. Deep work prioritized—only Monday/Friday have ~2 hours of meetings total per week.
- **Six-Week Structured Onboarding**: 2 weeks of simple Linear tasks → 2 weeks of solving open-ended problems → 2 weeks of proposing what the company needs.
- **Unlimited PTO**: Required minimum of 2 full consecutive weeks off per year (at least one week at a time). Friday/Saturday weekends off (the blog notes they rarely ask anyone to work weekends).
- **Generous Perks**: Competitive salary + stock options, unlimited PTO, first-class hardware, continuous learning budget (books, conferences, courses), medical/dental coverage, company credit card for work needs.
- **Direct Feedback Culture**: Feedback is public, direct, and given early—no silent PIPs. “Kind but direct” principle.
- **Transparent & Open**: All internal channels open by default. Daily wraps shared in public. #progress-pics channel for wins.

## Sources
1. [railway.com Careers Page](https://railway.com/careers)
2. [Railway Company Overview (Apollo.io)](https://www.apollo.io/companies/Railway/5f7f0e5f1e5b4c1e8b8b4567?chart=count)
3. [How We Work (Volume III) — Railway Blog](https://blog.railway.com/p/how-we-work-volume-iii)
4. [How We Work (Volume II) — Railway Blog](https://blog.railway.com/p/how-we-work-volume-ii)
5. [Railway Docs: Philosophy](https://docs.railway.com/platform/philosophy)
6. [LinkedIn — Railway](https://www.linkedin.com/company/railwayapp)
7. [Railway — Open Source Partner Program](https://railway.com/partners)
8. [Crunchbase — Railway (referenced via Apollo)](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/railway)

## Other roles at Railway

- [Growth Content Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-content-engineer-railway-united-states-8bwk18wnatan) — United States
- [Senior Product Engineer, Scalability](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-engineer-scalability-railway-global-nyswdqkn8441) — Global
- [Senior Infra Engineer: Observability](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-infra-engineer-observability-railway-global-vxydd91rk63v) — Global
- [Senior Platform Engineer: Storage](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-platform-engineer-storage-railway-global-ha611w9hzvkd) — Global
- [Infra Engineer - Datacenters](https://feeny.ai/job/infra-engineer-datacenters-railway-united-states-3wa14qrdeawy) — United States
- [Infrastructure Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/infrastructure-engineer-railway-global-mpjzmkk2gp9e) — Global
- [Senior Full-Stack Engineer - Product](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-full-stack-engineer-product-railway-global-10gw6xy0y6vc) — Global