Railway

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Senior Full-Stack Engineer - Support

Remote (anywhere)

Full-time

Job description

At Railway, we take the complexity out of shipping software. We aim to make developers more effective by allowing them to ship their code without any fuss — write your code, push it to us, and we deliver it to your end-users. We’re the Railway that takes your code from A to Z in a straight line: no transfers, no mad scrambling for boarding, no chaos in your journey.

Want to learn about our work culture? Here is a four-part blog series that will help you see the unique ways our team works (Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4).

About the role

This is a hybrid full-stack engineering role with user-facing elements. Learn more in our blog post at Support Engineering is Engineering.

Our philosophy is that support is a systems architecture problem dressed up as a human interaction challenge. Your mission is to maximize the "IOPS" between humans while minimizing the noise. We believe the best support ticket is the one that never gets created, and the best manual process is the one that no longer exists.

In this role:

  • You will be the infrastructure architect for support itself. At Railway, we don’t throw bodies at problems - we steamroll manual work into oblivion. See a repetitive task? That's not job security; that's a bug in our system waiting to be squashed. Whether it's workflow improvements or internal tooling, you'll automate the mundane so our team can focus on the magical.
  • You will craft best-in-class support experiences that are delightful for both end-users and the internal Railway team. A solution in this area can take many shapes. Sometimes it’s a simple contact form. Sometimes it's building a forum from scratch. Sometimes it's a tool so intuitive that customers solve their own problems before realizing they had them. You’ll identify what shape a solution needs to take by diving deep into problems that we and our users have, and implement solutions that make the complex feel simple and the broken feel whole again.

    • We're proudly lean with a small team making big impact, and this is only possible with strong systems that keep our flywheels spinning at maximum velocity. When other companies are hiring their 50th support agent, we're shipping our 5th automation that makes those 50 agents unnecessary. You're not here to manage support infrastructure. You're here to reinvent it - to build systems so smooth that scaling from 100 to 10,000 customers doesn't mean hiring 100x more people.

    About you

    You’re a great fit if you have:

  • The ability to architect and ship production-grade applications. You can design and implement entire systems from scratch, whether that's building a custom forum, creating internal debugging tools, or architecting automations that handle thousands of interactions.
  • Senior-level full-stack engineering expertise. You can build everything from React components to distributed systems, and you know when to reach for which tool.
  • A hacker’s mindset to eliminating toil. You see manual processes as bugs in the system. You recognize patterns, build abstractions that actually abstract, and create solutions that scale elegantly from 10 to 10,000 users.

    • The ideal candidate we’re looking for should also have:

  • Native proficiency in English with exceptional written communication skills. You can calm a panicked developer, explain DNS to a designer, and write docs that people understand by reading once. Your responses feel human and you know when to use technical precision vs accessible analogies.
  • Deep systems administration and infrastructure expertise. You're comfortable with Linux, can debug network issues by taking pcaps with tcpdump, understand what systemd does, and know why it's almost always DNS. You've managed production systems and understand the sharp edges.
  • Mastery of modern cloud and container orchestration. Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform aren't just buzzwords to you. You've built and operated these systems at scale, understand their failure modes, and can debug when pods mysteriously keep dying at 3am.
  • Experience across multiple cloud platforms. You've wrestled with IAM permissions, debugged networking across VPCs, and understand the trade-offs between providers. You can translate this knowledge into better tooling for our users and team.
  • The ability to context-switch between building and firefighting. One moment you're designing a new automation system, the next you're diving into a critical escalation. You thrive in this balance between long-term building and immediate problem-solving.

    • This role, in our opinion, is perfect for folks who have done tours in SRE, platform engineering, or full-stack engineering roles where you owned entire systems. Maybe you were the person who automated away half your team's work, or the engineer who built the internal tools everyone actually loved using.

    We don’t require you to check every box on the list, and we generally prefer working with people that are hungry for knowledge in areas they feel they’re lacking in, so please don’t hesitate to shoot us an application if you find Railway and the role interesting!

    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.

    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:

  • Build a Discord bot that streams messages from a Discord channel into a web front-end
  • In your project’s README, write up an overview of how your solution works, alternative solutions you may have considered, and any problem(s) your current solution may have.
  • You must have a back-end component that your front-end depends on. The web front-end should show messages as they’re posted into the Discord channel. Please create a Discord test server/channel if you need to.
  • Before the interview, please deploy on Railway and send us a URL to your deployment over the email thread you have with us. We will review the code during your interview. We'll explore your solution during the interview, as well as get you acquainted with a member of the team.
  • The interview will be 60 minutes, and it roughly follows this structure: 0-5 minutes for introductions → 5-30 minutes walking through the code and discussing your solution → 30-45 minutes noodling on support and your thoughts on it → 45-60 minutes for you to ask your interviewer questions.

    • 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.

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