R-22 · SCALEY
LIVELEADS THE FUNCTION
Founding Systems Architect, Scaley
Identical behaviour on bare metal, a hyperscaler, a colocation rack, and a provider that did not exist when the customer started. Somebody has to decide what that abstraction actually is.
FULL-TIME · FOUNDING · REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
OPENINGS
1
One. When it is filled, this page comes down.
BASE SALARY
£300,000 to £520,000
The band, published. The offer is the same whether or not you push for more.
EQUITY
0.90% to 1.50% of Scaley
Founding equity in the company you would actually work on.
01
The problem this role exists for
Scaley's promise is that push-to-deploy, per-branch previews, instant rollback and zero-config edges are available on metal you choose, with no SRE headcount as a prerequisite. Portability is the product, deliberately: the moment leaving is cheap, staying becomes a decision instead of a hostage situation.
That promise is an architecture problem with very little room for error. The abstraction has to be narrow enough to hold across substrates that disagree about networking, storage and identity, and wide enough that a customer never has to learn which one they are on. You would own that boundary, and the platform engineers building against it.
More on the company itself: Scaley →
02
Your first week, and a normal Tuesday
Your first fortnight is a written document: what the abstraction currently guarantees on every substrate, what it quietly does not, and which of those gaps you consider unacceptable. It will be read carefully and argued with, and then it becomes the plan.
A normal Tuesday: a long design block, a review of a change touching the substrate boundary, a conversation with a platform engineer about whether a customer request is a feature or a widening of the abstraction we will regret, and hiring. You still write code, and roughly half your week is meant to be spent doing it.
WHAT YOU WOULD BE WORKING IN
Go and Rust are both in the building. Kubernetes and containers, bare metal and hyperscalers, networking at a level most people avoid, and infrastructure as code. Which of those you have depth in matters much less than whether you can hold a boundary across all of them.
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 abstraction
What is guaranteed on every substrate, and what is honestly not.
02
The substrate layer
Bare metal, hyperscaler, colo, hybrid, and whichever one comes next.
03
The team
You hire and lead the platform engineers on this venture.
04
The exit
Leaving has to stay cheap. You keep it that way when it is inconvenient.
04
What we are looking for
MINIMUM
What we would need to see
- ▸You have designed a platform other engineers built on, and can describe the abstraction you got wrong
- ▸Real depth across at least two substrates, one of which was not a hyperscaler
- ▸You can hold a boundary. Most platform failures are a boundary widened once as a favour
- ▸You want to lead a small team and still write code, and you are clear-eyed about that ratio
PREFERRED
What would move you up the pile
- ▸You have run production on bare metal or in colocation, not only in a cloud account
- ▸Multi-tenant isolation at the compute layer, and scars from it
- ▸You have built a platform whose users were external customers rather than colleagues
- ▸Experience migrating something substantial off a provider, which is the promise we are making
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
£300,000 to £520,000 base, plus 0.90% to 1.50% 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.