Team Spotlight: Infrastructure Engineering

In the Team Spotlight series, we’ll embark on a journey through the inner workings of the most pivotal Railway teams. In the second installment, we’re talking with some members of the Infrastructure Engineering team.

Infrastructure Engineering is responsible for building the primitives (network, storage, runtime) that allow users to deploy and compose their payloads on Railway. The team also makes sure uptime and reliability are core tenets of those building blocks and that Railway delivers a level of service that measures up to the biggest cloud providers on the internet.

Railway's Infrastructure Engineering team is comprised of five engineers with diverse backgrounds, ranging from ex-founders to seasoned startup veterans. This deep technical experience combines nicely with practical knowledge to create a team that has lots of ambition and little fear.

Before we delve into personal perspectives, let's explore some of the exciting projects the Infra Engineering team has recently undertaken. From open source initiatives to large-scale projects and features, these projects impact hundreds of thousands of developers around the world:

• Volumes (block storage)
• Fault tolerant, durable, and performant volumes for databases and stateful applications
• Baremetal servers
• The design, spec, and rollout of hardware to physical datacenters around the globe
• Custom orchestration engine (not Kubernetes)
• A multi-tenant orchestrator built from scratch to scale to 10m+ user deployments
• Private Networking
• A multi-tenant mesh overlay network for user deployments using eBPF, Wireguard, IPv6, and L4 encapsulation
• Application Sleeping (aka “Serverless”)
• A custom L3 socket activation server to seamlessly wake and sleep any instances without dropping packets
• Edge Network v3
• A custom L4 and L7 edge proxy (replacing Envoy) backed by a custom service discovery protocol to serve millions of tenants, provide QoS, and mitigate L4/L7 DoS attacks

Now, let's hear from the team themselves.

We spoke with our infrastructure team about what got them excited to work at Railway, and why they’re still here today.

Here’s what they had to say:

Jon, an Infrastructure Engineer that recently joined Railway, connects with the purpose of the product itself — to empower developers everywhere to do their best work:

Put simply, it's pretty rare to find an environment that allows you to get paid to do the kind of work you'd usually be spending your own time and money on. Railway feels different. There's crystallized purpose in everything that we do, and a focus on the humanity of why we do it and who we're doing it with. It's special. I hope to keep that for as long as I possibly can.

Charith, an Infrastructure Engineer with almost two years at Railway, loves tough problems at scale:

I find excitement in the massive scale of engineering challenges and a problem space that goes beyond typical software engineering jobs. The team's approach to solving pain points in DevOps/Infra with a killer attitude towards overcoming challenges sets Railway apart.

Pierre, who’s been both a Product Engineer AND an Infrastructure Engineer here at Railway, loves the speed of development and a team that’s easy to relate to:

To thrive I truly want to work in a dynamic environments surrounded by intelligent, curious, and humble colleagues. Joining Railway, I found these qualities, confirming that our mission to revolutionize deployment aligns with the fast-paced, challenging, and empowering work culture I crave.

Next we talked to the team about what makes someone successful at Railway.

Here’s what they said:

Railway values individuals deeply invested in solving problems and who embrace the Art of Architecture. The expectation is clear — take responsibility for your time, show commitment, and respect others' value.

Railway seeks self-driven individuals passionate about their work, unafraid of owning complex problem domains, and capable of adapting to uncertainties.

The common denominator at Railway is the builder mindset. Whether you're in Product, Platform, Support, or Logistics, everyone is a coder, contributing to projects from ideation to production. The goal is always to simplify and delight.

To be at your best the team at Railway believes that you must have the chance to work on things that truly excite you. It’s important to create opportunities for you to showcase your skills as well as grow.

I spoke with our Infra team about what projects at Railway did this for them.

Here’s what they had to say:

I enjoy the exciting opportunities in internal security tooling and the intriguing world of object/block storage. The chance to build something world-class without historical baggage is a thrilling prospect!

My enthusiasm shines through in projects like overlay networks with WireGuard + BPF, transitioning to bare metal without conventional enterprise dogma, and crafting a custom control plane. These are thrilling challenges for those who seek to push boundaries. Folks like that would do great here at Railway.

I love diving into fascinating projects like Private Networking, Regions, and Orchestration. These projects span a wide array of technologies and problem spaces, showcasing Railway's commitment to seeking simple, novel, and elegant solutions.

At Railway, we're not just a passionate team building products — we're building fundamental internet infrastructure to help every developer build applications faster.

If you value impactful work, thrive in an environment of craftsmanship, and love complex and novel engineering challenges, Railway could be the next stop on your career journey.

Ready to hop aboard? We’re hiring for infrastructure and other roles. Check out all of our current openings!