R-23 · SCALEY
LIVEFounding Platform Engineer, Scaley
No platform team required, for the customer. The complexity does not vanish. It moves here.
FULL-TIME · FOUNDING · REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
OPENINGS
1
One. When it is filled, this page comes down.
BASE SALARY
£220,000 to £370,000
The band, published. The offer is the same whether or not you push for more.
EQUITY
0.50% to 1.10% of Scaley
Founding equity in the company you would actually work on.
01
The problem this role exists for
Build the machinery behind one command: builds, per-branch previews, rollbacks that are actually instant, routing and the edges. Then make it behave identically whether it lands on a rack in a colocation facility or inside somebody's existing cloud account.
Scaley is live and already runs the group's own deployments, so you have real users on day one and several of them sit near you. That is a short feedback loop, and an unforgiving one.
More on the company itself: Scaley →
02
Your first week, and a normal Tuesday
Week one you take the oldest open reliability complaint, reproduce it on two different substrates, and fix it. It will teach you more about the abstraction than any document, and the fix ships inside the fortnight.
A normal Tuesday: control-plane work, a rollback path that has to be boring, and a customer whose deployment does something nobody anticipated. You are on call for what you ship, on a small rota that is taken seriously, and roughly a day a week goes on making the runbook shorter.
WHAT YOU WOULD BE WORKING IN
Go on the control plane, containers and orchestration, Linux, infrastructure as code, and whatever the substrate of the week demands. Rust turns up on the hot paths. Breadth is more useful in this role than depth in one vendor's ecosystem.
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 deploy path
One command, and everything it sets in motion.
02
Previews and rollback
The two features people switch for, and both have to be boring.
03
Cost
Bare-metal economics are the argument. You keep them true.
04
The runbook
Written so that no platform team is required to read it.
04
What we are looking for
MINIMUM
What we would need to see
- ▸You have operated infrastructure at a scale where you learned what actually fails
- ▸Depth in containers, orchestration, networking or build systems, and scepticism about at least one of them
- ▸You would rather absorb complexity than expose a configuration option
- ▸You have been on call and have views about what made it survivable
PREFERRED
What would move you up the pile
- ▸Bare metal or colocation experience, including the parts involving a physical building
- ▸You have built self-serve infrastructure used by people you never met
- ▸Comfort in Go or Rust, or a strong record of picking up a language quickly
- ▸You have deleted a feature to keep an abstraction narrow
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
£220,000 to £370,000 base, plus 0.50% to 1.10% 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.