Solution Engineer
Job description
At Railway, we make it extremely simple for engineers to deploy logic without thinking about servers. Our goal is to make developers orders of magnitude more efficient by becoming the operating system for modern development.
By building tooling for infrastructure automation, we seek to make people 100x more effective, and build 100x more impactful systems. Building leverage is a core part of what we do.
Railway has grown it’s paying developer base by an extreme factor over the last year. Now we are looking to build an even better relationship with companies who are looking to us for guidance on how to best adopt Railway for their use-cases.
As our first Solutions Engineer, you will draw upon your technical background and work with prospective customers, existing users, and the team to make sure Railway can meet the needs of their production environments. We have a number of new features that we have shipped which serve the needs of complex engineering teams and we need a champion who can demonstrate Railway’s value.
You’ll be working directly with our CEO and our product team to build out our early pipeline while also developing and sharing insight with our customers. We have some aggressive business goals this year and we can’t wait to work with the right person to lead us there.
“Found business pain creates opportunity”. John McMahon
About the role
This is a role where you will spend time working with our developer pipeline; assisting those who need a guided implementation. Railway is demo-optional, we prefer to optimize for developer experience but we also know that companies appreciate the assurance of having an expert assist them with adoption.
You’d work directly with the team and customer to:
Reach out to customers to guide their success with Railway and help them onboard. Leveraging your engineering experience to help our customers make the best decisions.
Collaborate within the broader team to advocate for customers via internalizing customer feedback and needs
Building out Proof of Concepts and demos, baking in your insights from customer conversations into requirements into the core product
Help design and implement scalable processes for identifying high quality prospects
Partner with the CEO as needed on larger deals while serving as an advocate for the customer
The Solutions Engineer role has the opportunity to break ground on Railway’s revenue. Not only will you build the processes to identify customers, but you’ll be working directly with them to make sure Railway is a great fit for them. Finally, you’ll catalog and internalize the customers feedback and work directly with our product team to advance Railway to serve larger and larger organizations.
This role will have a direct impact in the future of our company and as such will present you the opportunity to grow with our company.
About you
We are looking for someone who is highly empathetic to the needs of developers who also doesn’t shy away from the problems that developers face.
An inquiring mind as you sit down with customers, learn about their application, and help them remove any roadblocks in setting up Railway for the project, organization, and beyond
Experience with Infrastructure products of all types. You should have a good understanding about the Big Cloud product portfolio. Bonus: you can work through TF configs and K8s setups.
A strong ability to compartmentalize, deconstruct, and dig into customer feedback. What are they trying to do, why, and how can we help them get there.
A strong work ethic and sense of ownership, with a background in fast paced, small venture backed teams. You won’t shy away from opening up a PR to make sure that someone is successful.
A student and professor of the game. Our customers will be looking to you to guide them, but, the world of infra is a constantly shifting one. You should revel in learning about new technologies and understanding how this impacts developers.
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 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:
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.
Work on a small project to discuss in the interview
Asynchronously implement the following:
An example customer is moving from AWS to Railway
Define this customer (up to you)
Construct a project on Railway to mirror their theoretical setup
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 a member of the team
During the call:
Define this customer (up to you)
Construct a project on Railway to mirror their theoretical setup
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.
Chat with CEO
Sit down with our founder and CEO for 30 minutes. This is a 1:1, open ended conversation.
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.