R-25 · SCALEY
LIVEFounding Networking and Edge Engineer, Scaley
Zero-config edges on metal you chose. Every word of that is a networking problem.
FULL-TIME · FOUNDING · REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
OPENINGS
1
One. When it is filled, this page comes down.
BASE SALARY
£230,000 to £390,000
The band, published. The offer is the same whether or not you push for more.
EQUITY
0.55% to 1.15% of Scaley
Founding equity in the company you would actually work on.
01
The problem this role exists for
Scaley claims identical behaviour on bare metal, a hyperscaler, a colocation rack and a provider that did not exist last year. Those substrates disagree most fundamentally about networking: routing, load balancing, TLS termination, address allocation, and what an edge even is. Papering over that difference without lying about it is the hardest single part of the product.
You would own the data path: the proxy, routing, certificates, anycast where we have it and its equivalent where we do not, and the edge behaviour customers get for free. It is also the part of the system where a mistake is visible to everybody within seconds, which shapes how the work gets done.
More on the company itself: Scaley →
02
Your first week, and a normal Tuesday
Your first week: trace a single request end to end across two different substrates and document every place the behaviour diverges. That list currently lives in three people's heads and has never been written down. Writing it is your first contribution.
A normal Tuesday: proxy work, a certificate path that needs to be boring, and a performance question that turns out to be a routing question. Occasionally a genuinely interesting failure at a colocation facility. You are on call for the data path, on a rota that is small and taken seriously.
WHAT YOU WOULD BE WORKING IN
Rust or Go on the proxy, real Linux networking, BGP and anycast where we run it, TLS and certificate automation, and Kubernetes networking with its many disappointments. Depth in the fundamentals matters far more than familiarity with any particular service mesh.
We do not screen on tools. Nothing above is a requirement, and a stack list is a poor proxy for whether somebody can do the work. If you have gone deep in something else and would arrive with a view about why half of this is the wrong choice, that is an argument we would like to have.
03
What you would own
Not a ticket queue and not a slice of somebody else’s roadmap. Four things with your name against them in the decision log, from the first fortnight.
01
The data path
Every request, on every substrate, behaving the same way.
02
Certificates
Issuance and renewal that nobody ever has to think about.
03
Edges
Zero-config edge behaviour, including where the substrate does not offer one.
04
Divergence
The honest list of where substrates differ, kept short.
04
What we are looking for
MINIMUM
What we would need to see
- ▸You have worked on production networking, proxies or load balancing and owned the outcome
- ▸Real Linux networking knowledge, below the level of the usual abstractions
- ▸Comfort in a compiled language
- ▸You have debugged something that turned out to be three layers below where everybody was looking
PREFERRED
What would move you up the pile
- ▸BGP, anycast, or having run your own address space
- ▸Envoy, nginx or HAProxy internals, or having written a proxy yourself
- ▸TLS, PKI and certificate automation at scale
- ▸Colocation or bare-metal operations, including the parts involving a physical building
Nothing in the preferred column is a filter, and neither list is applied before a human reads you. No degree is required for anything on this page, and we have hired people with doctorates and people with no degree at all into the same rooms. If you meet most of the minimum and not all of it, write anyway and say in the first paragraph which part you do not meet.
05
Pay, and everything around it
£230,000 to £390,000 base, plus 0.55% to 1.15% of Scaley, reviewed upward annually without you having to ask. The band is published here rather than discovered three conversations in, and the offer is the same whether or not you negotiate, because the band is the band.
Everything else is what the whole group gets and is not negotiated per offer: a holiday floor rather than a ceiling, health and dental and vision for your family, sixteen to twenty weeks of parental leave for every parent, a funded setup, monthly paid group meetups somewhere in the world, one required funded trip abroad each year, a protected day a week on the research ventures, and no non-competes.
The full list, the salary band chart and the visa sponsorship map are on the careers page. We sponsor without qualification across seventeen jurisdictions and publish exactly which.
06
Apply for this role
Four steps: a conversation with somebody who would actually work with you, one real problem drawn from work we are genuinely doing, a working session on your solution, and a decision within a week of that session. The problem is paid if it runs long, and you keep the work either way.