Senior Infra Engineer: Storage

For this role, you will: 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 on-line backups and zero-downtime/live workload migration Write Engineering Requirement Documents to take something from idea, to defined tasks, to implementation, to monitoring its success Set the longer-term architectural direction to scale the platform This is a high impact, high agency role with direct effect on company culture, trajectory, and outcome. About you You should meet one or more of the following requirements: You've built and operated distributed storage systems and have a strong grasp of first-principles. You have 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 You have a deep understanding of the algorithms and techniques behind building fast, performant and reliable storage systems. You have experience building large distributed systems where consistency and availability was critical. You have a strong background in performance engineering at the I/O layer on Linux. You have strong foundation in systems programming with Rust. You're comfortable owning a problem alone at a small company. You have 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 12-18 months. You have the grit to dive into a problem, implement a solution, scale that solution, and replace it when needed. You communicate well enough to get your point across, your solution implemented, and documented for when you're not around. If your background is in adjacent infrastructure (hypervisor I/O, kernel development, distributed systems, persistent memory) and you want to apply that depth to storage, we want to hear from you. 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 globally distributed—and getting more so. Stuff is always happening somewhere. We don't expect you to be online all the time, but you'll need to be diligent about your boundaries — your end of day will overlap with someone else's start. We're a small, high-ownership team that cares deeply about doing exceptional work. We're scaling quickly, which means we rely on leverage—systems over coordination, judgment over process. Expect ambiguity and a fast-moving environment. You'll own real outcomes. That means making decisions, not just executing—and owning the success, or failure, that comes with them. 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 . 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: Design a Storage Engine to power something like Railway's Volumes 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! 3 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. 4 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. 5 Chat with CEO Sit down with our founder and CEO for 30 minutes. This is a 1:1, open ended conversation. 6 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.