At Fly.io, the infra ops team builds and maintains the platform and tooling that allow our product engineers to build some really amazing stuff for users. In particular, that means making it so that product teams (machines, managed postgres, proxy/networking, etc.) can operate the products they’re building well. It also means keeping the servers running (along with all the important software on those servers).

Just like in every engineering role at Fly.io, as an infrastructure engineer, you’ll need to be user focused to the extreme. The only difference is, in the infra role, your user is other product teams (rather than customers who deploy their apps on Fly.io’s platform). In this role, you’ll have a ton of autonomy and direct your own work — you’ll use your user focus to help guide your work, so you’re working on the most impactful things.

Some things you might work on:

• Setting up and iterating on tooling for metrics/monitoring and alerting, so that product teams can reliably operate their products.
• Writing lots of “glue” code integrating various tools in ways that are valuable (and easy to use) for product teams.
• Piecing tools together in clever/new/interesting ways to solve product team needs.
• Helping refine capacity planning, and automating quick burst capacity (for when our capacity planning isn’t quite right).
• Building the underlying hosting infrastructure that allows product teams to run multi-tenant workloads without having to worry about individual hosts.
• Responding to hardware failures, and interfacing with our provider to get hardware changed out as needed.
• Making it easy and safe (and as automatic as possible) to make changes to critical system components (like upgrading the OS on our servers).
• Working with our upstream providers to debug hairy networking issues.

This role will be a good fit for you if:

• You’re good at figuring out what product teams really need in order to build and operate their products.
• You know core infrastructure tech concepts and tools (linux, networking, etc.).
• You’re good at debugging, figuring out weird stuff, picking up new tools and ways of doing things, and you can do it all under pressure.
• You can work autonomously — you can look at a big problem, and figure out a small piece to work on next, without being told what to do, and you can see the long-term vision of where to go after that.
• You are very effective at written communication. You can write concisely, focusing on the most important points, and you consider your audience.
• You are good at sharing ownership and working on a team.
• You move fast. This absolutely does not mean you over-work yourself (we want you to work normal human hours and take care of yourself), but it means that you’re decisive, work with purpose, and don’t let yourself get bogged down in less impactful work.

You’ll know you’re succeeding in your job if:

• You’re always thinking about how folks on the product teams are using the tools you’re building, and what problem you’re solving for them.
• Your solutions are broadly useful. You probably had one small initial use-case in mind, but the thing you built gets used again and again, by several different product teams.
• Product teams at Fly.io are able to build new features fast on top of the infrastructure you’ve built.
• Product teams at Fly.io are able to operate their products effectively. They know when their product is working (and when it’s not), and have the tools they need to quickly solve problems.

More details

This is a mid-level to senior, fully-remote, full-time position.

In order to optimize for pay equity, Fly.io doesn’t negotiate salaries. We have standardized salaries for each employee level. The salary for this role is $134 or 190k USD, depending on level. We offer competitive equity grants with a long exercise window. We provide health care benefits, flexible vacation time (with a minimum), hardware/phone allowances, the standard stuff.

Our hiring process may be a little different from what you’re used to. We respect career experience but we aren’t hypnotized by it, and we’re thrilled at the prospect of discovering new talent. So instead of resumes and interviews, we’re going to show you the kind of work we’re doing and then see if you enjoy actually doing it, with “work-sample challenges”. Unlike a lot of places that assign “take-home problems”, our challenges are the backbone of our whole process; they’re not pre-screeners for an interview gauntlet. (We’re happy to talk, though!)

If you’re interested, mail jobs+prod-infra@fly.io. You can tell us a bit about yourself, if you like. Please also include your location (country), and your Github username, for work sample access.