Senior Product Engineer, Scalability - Railway

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. Railway now powers workloads for millions of builders, and the systems underneath — usage metering, billing and payments, fraud and abuse protection, background workers, and the data pipelines that feed them all — have to scale every week.

You'll be the person who architects that stack: making it fast, correct, and trustworthy at a volume that keeps growing. If you're looking to scale the backbone of an operating system for builders, we'd love to talk with you!

Want to learn about our work culture? Here is a multi-part blog series that will help you see the unique ways our team works (Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4).

About the Role

This is a backend-leaning role focused on scaling systems. Billing and fraud will be a focus, but your remit spans every high-throughput system at Railway — workers, queues, event pipelines, and the databases underneath them. You'll own your work end-to-end, including when a feature reaches the UI.

Responsibilities

• Architect and scale the pipelines that turn raw usage into accurate, real-time billing — metering, aggregation, rating, and invoicing across millions of events, from ingestion in ClickHouse to the rating engine.
• Build payment flows that are correct under concurrency and partial failure: idempotent charges, retries, reconciliation, and clean handling of provider edge cases (Stripe and beyond).
• Develop fraud and abuse detection — signal collection, real-time scoring, automated mitigation — that protects platform margin without getting in legitimate users' way.
• Scale the systems everything else depends on: Postgres under heavy write load, Node.js services under pressure, and long-running workflows orchestrated with Temporal where exactly-once semantics and durability actually matter.
• Build TypeScript + GraphQL APIs where correctness and auditability are non-negotiable.
• Write Engineering Requirement Documents to take something from idea, to defined tasks, to implementation, to monitoring its success and scaling it further.
• Contribute to our open-source repositories (CLI, Typescript SDK, Railpack, etc.) — Rust experience, or the desire to learn it, helps here.
• Be on-call from time to time.

Example Projects

• Re-architect billing end-to-end: per-second usage metering at platform scale, idempotent payment processing that survives provider outages without double-charging, and credit, prepayment, and enterprise-invoicing models that hold up under audit.
• Stand up a fraud-detection service that scores signups and deployments in real time and automatically throttles abuse (crypto mining, free-tier farming, stolen cards).
• Scale our Temporal workloads to orchestrate workflows across millions of deployments.
• Build internal tooling that gives teams across Railway a trustworthy, real-time view into the systems they depend on.

About You

• An ability to autonomously lead, design, and implement backend systems where correctness, consistency, and auditability are first-class requirements.
• A track record of scaling systems — you've taken a pipeline, service, or database that was falling over and made it handle 10x, and you know which tools to reach for (and when polling stops being enough).
• Deep expertise in Postgres and relational data modeling — you reach for the right consistency guarantees, understand the cost of getting them wrong, and know how Postgres itself behaves at scale.
• Strong working knowledge of Node.js internals — the event loop, memory behavior, and what to do when a service degrades under load.
• Experience managing complex asynchronous and long-running backend jobs, ideally with a workflow engine like Temporal, for things like billing runs or payment reconciliation.
• Familiarity with the realities of money movement: payment providers, idempotency, retries, reconciliation, and their failure modes. Direct billing, payments, or fraud experience is a strong plus.
• A security and abuse-aware mindset — you instinctively think about how a system can be gamed, and you design accordingly.
• A desire to be a part of the entire project development process, from research gathering and planning, to implementation and monitoring.
• Great written and verbal communication skills for expressing ideas, designs, and potential solutions in a mostly-asynchronous manner.

Workplace Culture & Expectations

• Globally distributed: We're globally distributed—and getting more so. Stuff is always happening somewhere.
• Boundaries: We don't expect you to be online all the time, but you'll need to be diligent about your boundaries — your end of day will overlap with someone else's start.
• High leverage: We're a small, high-ownership team that cares deeply about doing exceptional work. We rely on leverage—systems over coordination, judgment over process.
• High ownership: You'll own real outcomes. That means making decisions, not just executing—and owning the success, or failure, that comes with them.

Benefits & Perks

At Railway, we provide best-in-class benefits:

• Great salary & strong equity grants
• Full health benefits, including coverage for dependents
• Equipment stipend
• Autonomy: Very few meetings (just Monday and Friday company board syncs).
• Growth: Dedicated support for long-term career progression.

Interview Process

1. Introductory Chat: Open-ended conversation about your background and career goals.
2. Architecture Design Task: Asynchronously design a scaling system in a domain of your choice (e.g., usage metering pipeline or observability stream-processing system).
3. Solution Review: Walk through your design with an engineer (60-minute interview focusing on trade-offs, concurrency, and failure modes).
4. Meet the Team: Connect with 4 team members across different company functions.
5. Founder Chat: 30-minute 1:1 with our founder and CEO.
6. Offer Call: Finalize details and prepare for onboarding.