Product Engineer

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.

At Railway, we believe that making tooling more accessible for build and deployment is one of the greatest possible productivity unlocks of our generation. We also believe that the major roadblock between us and our goal is strong interfacing paradigms.

If you’re looking to build an operating system for builders, we’d love to talk with you!

“Computer scientists have so far worked on developing powerful programming languages that make it possible to solve the technical problems of computation. Little effort has gone toward devising the language of interaction.”

- Donald Norman

About the role

For this role, you will:

Work with our design team to craft intuitive interfaces for allowing our users to interface with powerful computing paradigms.Build TypeScript + GraphQL APIs with strong guarantees around modeling data, allowing both internal and external users to build on top of your workExperience designing query efficient data models, whether the queries are from the frontend to the GraphQL layer, backend to databases, or across federated microservices in the infra layerWrite Engineering Requirement Documents to take something from idea, to defined tasks, to implementation, to monitoring it’s success.Experience with, or at least the desire to learn Rust to contribute to our opensource repositories (CLI, Nixpacks, etc)

This is a high impact, high agency role with direct effect on company culture, trajectory, and outcome.

About you

A strong understanding of frontend architecture. The ideal candidate is well versed in building elegant yet powerful models for fetching, mutating, and rendering data effectivelyThe tact to implement your solution, creator monitors for it’s error boundaries, and document any requirements for when you’re not aroundA great sense of direction and prioritization when it comes to dealing with the ambiguity of an early stage startupA sense of grit to dive into a problem, implement a solution, scale that solution, and replace it when neededA great set of communication skills for getting your point across, solution implemented, and beyond

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 7, serving tens 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:

Asynchronously implement the following:Build an application to spin up and spin down a container using our GQL API. Please deploy on Railway before the interview and we will review the code during your interview. The app needs to have a UI component and not just a backend that uses the API.You will submit your solution before the interview, and sit down with a member of the team and go over the above. We'll poke into your solution, as well as get you acquainted with a member of the team.Interview Structure (60 Minutes):Prework (submitted before your interview): Create your app0-5 minutes: Introductions5-35 minutes: Walking through the code, talking about how you’d extend it35-50 minutes: Noodling on technology, frameworks, how you think about product50-60 minutes: Time for you to ask your interviewers question

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.