Job description
About the role
You will talk to users and drive meaningful resolution.
You are the champion of our users.
You write, for us and our users.
You will build systems to improve our team’s capabilities.
About you
- A sense of grit to dive into a problem, implement a solution, scale that solution, and replace it when needed
- A great sense of direction and prioritization when it comes to dealing with the ambiguity of an early stage startup
- A high degree of empathy for developers of all skill levels, and willingness to meet them where they’re at
- A hacker mindset that recognizes patterns, the shortest-path to resolving issues, and eventually addressing the root cause of the issue
- The ability to debug complex technical issues that may range from tracing code paths to wrangling with *nix-y systems
- Effective writing and communication skills with a personable nature; able to distill difficult technical concepts to a wide range of users
- Some level of working knowledge in the DevTools or infrastructure space: Docker, kubernetes, cloud platforms, etc.
- A keen interest in full-stack engineering, from aligning a button to building resilient back-end systems
- Worked in a software engineering team, and cross-functional teams interfacing with engineering, product, and support at some levels
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:
- Create a GitHub issues renderer.
You can, and SHOULD! ask us questions ahead of time. What our prior solution looks like, what ideas we have to improve it, etc. 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
Offer and Details Chat with CEO
Finally, we will go over the process, the role, and hammer out the details about your position, onboarding, and all the deets.
Final Note: The interview goes both ways. Once again, please ask us things. Many things! Hard things. That's what we're here for.