Senior Platform Engineer: Storage

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.

Building the infrastructure which powers the Railway engine is the most core problem at Railway. As an infrastructure engineer working on stoarge, you will be directly responsible for designing software and hardware to back performant, high reliability block storage and object storage systems backing millions of applications. The solutions you build will be instrumental in not only scaling internal operations, but scaling the company to infinity and beyond!

“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

Curious? Here are 3 blog posts that dive into exciting projects this team has worked on: 1, 2, 3

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

About The Role

For this role, you will:

• Design and evolve multiple production Ceph clusters, from hardware design, to driving network requirements to configuring, tuning and operating clusters and their clients

• Create efficient, generalizable APIs using systems/kernel features to provide safe, as-fast-as-possible live-migrations of stateful workload between hosts

• Design and build API and Orchestration services to tie storage primitives to higher level primitives using Go, gRPC, ScyllaDB and Temporal

• Write Engineering Requirement Documents to take something from idea, to defined tasks, to implementation, to monitoring it’s success

• Design build a suite of storage primitives that can be used by customer applications, internal services and enable higher level platform features such as streaming image pulls or movable build caches

About You

• Experience architecting and implementing distributed systems. You enjoy building fault tolerant, resilient, and scalable services

• Production experience with distributed block device systems (e.g Ceph) or a solid understanding of network storage cluster design from first principles

• Understanding and experience with current gen filesystems (Ext4, ZFS, BTRFS). Bonus points for next gen (EROFS, bcachefs)

• 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, creator monitors for it’s error boundaries, and document any requirements for when you’re not around

• A great sense of direction