Company: Railway
Location: Remote (Global)
About the Company
Railway’s mission is to make software engineers higher leverage by giving them powerful infrastructure tools that remove setup complexity and let them focus on building.
Unlike traditional infrastructure platforms that focus on deploying a single application in isolation, Railway is building a system where services work together seamlessly. The platform addresses complex challenges such as zero-downtime deployments, service-to-service communication, and large-scale reliability—problems that are often left for engineers to solve on their own.
Railway aims to be a comprehensive infrastructure solution, and networking is a critical part of that vision.
Role Overview
Railway is hiring a Platform Engineer with a strong networking background to help design, build, and evolve its global networking infrastructure. This role sits within platform engineering and is ideal for engineers who enjoy building foundational systems that “just work”—often invisibly—at massive scale.
While networking is the primary focus, candidates should expect to contribute across broader platform engineering initiatives as well.
This is a high-impact, high-ownership role with direct influence on the company’s technical direction, reliability, and long-term scalability.
Key Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain Railway’s edge routing layer using a custom eBPF-based L4 proxy
- Develop a private internal network to dynamically mesh services using technologies such as eBPF and WireGuard
- Manage bare-metal rack-level eBGP broadcasting to support a globally distributed anycast network
- Design and implement advanced DDoS mitigation strategies
- Build high-performance Golang gRPC services designed to scale to millions of users
- Define immutable infrastructure capable of teardown, failover, and full reconstitution
- Author Engineering Requirement Documents (ERDs) covering design, implementation, and success metrics
- Expose internal microservices through TypeScript and GraphQL APIs
- Collaborate across platform and product teams to ensure reliable, scalable infrastructure
Ideal Candidate Profile
- Experience with overlay networking technologies (e.g., VXLAN, WireGuard)
- Hands-on experience writing eBPF programs for packet routing and network traffic handling
- Strong background operating and troubleshooting production-grade datacenter networks
- Familiarity with BGP, internet routing, and physical (Layer 1) datacenter infrastructure
- Deep understanding of Linux networking internals and performance tuning
- Ability to design systems with realistic lifespan expectations in startup environments
- Strong documentation habits and monitoring-first mindset
- Comfortable navigating ambiguity and prioritizing effectively in early-stage companies
- Strong communication skills and ability to drive solutions end to end
- Enjoys analyzing latency, reliability, and performance metrics
- Candidates from all backgrounds are encouraged to apply
Working Environment
- Fully distributed, global team
- Early-stage startup environment with high ownership and ambiguity
- Small, highly accountable engineering team (~21 people at time of posting)
- Flexible boundaries required due to global time zone overlap
- Emphasis on ownership—engineers are expected to own outcomes, both successes and failures
Benefits & Perks
Railway offers a competitive compensation package, including:
- Competitive salary
- Comprehensive health coverage (including dependents)
- Strong equity grants
- Equipment stipend
- Additional benefits detailed on the company’s main careers page
What sets Railway apart:
- Autonomy: Minimal meetings; focus on deep work
- Ownership: Engineers are expected to meaningfully shape the company
- Challenging problems: Emphasis on novel, high-leverage infrastructure challenges
- Growth: Support for long-term career growth, inside or beyond Railway
Hiring Process
The hiring process is fully transparent and includes:
- Introductory conversation – Open-ended discussion about experience and goals
- Technical design project – Design a networking engine for a platform managing stateless and stateful workloads
- Project review – Walkthrough and discussion with the engineering team
- Team interviews – Meet engineers from different functional areas
- CEO conversation – One-on-one discussion with the Founder & CEO
- Offer discussion – Final details and onboarding
Candidates are encouraged to ask questions throughout the process.
Final Note
The interview process is designed to be a two-way evaluation. Candidates are encouraged to ask thoughtful, challenging questions to ensure mutual alignment.