Product Designer

At Railway, we make it extremely simple for engineers to deploy logic without thinking about servers. Our goal is to make developers orders of magnitude more efficient by becoming the operating system for modern development.

By building tooling for infrastructure automation, we seek to make people 100x more effective, and build 100x more impactful systems. Building leverage is a core part of what we do.

We’re seeking a versatile and seasoned Product Designer who strives to create great products, loves collaborating, and takes the initiative. The ideal candidate will derive satisfaction from ideating, designing, and delivering exceptional solutions to hundreds of thousands of developers. This position is tailored for a well-rounded professional who appreciates the art of creative thinking but places equal importance on witnessing their ideas come to life.

“Products are made in a factory but brands are created in the mind.” - Walter Landor

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

About the role

• Play a pivotal role in Railway's developer experience, redefining the future of software infrastructure.

• Collaborate closely with product, support, and engineering to scope, define, design, and ship high-quality features.

• Contribute to the overall design direction of the product, leveraging your creativity and problem-solving skills to address complex design challenges and deliver elegant solutions.

• Balance user needs, business goals, and technical constraints of design solutions, ensuring that Railway remains user-friendly, scalable, and reliable.

• Define workflows, prototypes, and visual design of your projects.

• Learn about our users, how they use our platform, understand their pain points, and propose projects to fix them.

• Help us maintain and evolve our internal Design System

• Work in an ambiguous environment to create levers for design excellence, using process sparingly but effectively.

• Contribute to the design culture within the company.

About you

• You have a strong portfolio showcasing your skills in user interface design, interaction design, and visual design. Your portfolio demonstrates your ability to solve complex design problems and showcases your attention to detail.

• You care about creating good products, understand what makes a good experience, and constantly think of improvement opportunities for the products you use.

• You care about business needs, implications, and the practicality of your solutions and work to deliver clear, intuitive, and appealing human interfaces.

• You are a creative thinker who can push the boundaries of design while ensuring a balance between user needs, business goals, and technical constraints.

• You feel comfortable designing, illustrating, iterating, and prototyping in Figma, but always look for new tools to open new possibilities (Blender, Spline, Rive, shaders, etc.).

• You have experience balancing trade-offs while implementing a feature to ship it on time without compromising the long-term product vision.

• You have experience effectively collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver high-quality designs within project timelines.

• You have excellent communication skills and can articulate design decisions and rationale effectively to stakeholders and team members.

We value and love to work with diverse persons from all backgrounds

Things to know

For better or worse, we're a startup; our team dynamics are different from companies of different sizes and stages.

• We're distributed ALL across the globe, and that's only going to be more and more distributed. As a result, stuff is ALWAYS happening.

• We do NOT expect you to work all the time, but you'll have to be diligent about your boundaries because the end of your day may overlap with the start of someone else's.

• We're a small team, with high ownership, who are not only passionate about what we do, but seek to be exceptional as well. At the time of writing we're 21, serving hundreds of thousands of users. There's a lot of stuff going on, and a lot of ambiguity.

• We want you to own it. We believe that ownership is a key to growth, and part of that growth is not only being able to make the choices, but owning the success, or failure, that comes with those choices.

Benefits and perks

At Railway, we provide best in class benefits. Great salary, full health benefits including dependents, strong equity grants, equipment stipend, and much more. For more details, check back on the main careers page.

Beyond compensation, there are a few things that we believe that make working at Railway truly unique:

• Autonomy: We have very few meetings. Just a Monday and a Friday to go over the Company Board. We think your time is sacred, whether it's at work, or outside of work.

• Ownership: We're a company with a high ownership, high autonomy culture. We hope that you'll come in, help us, and over the course of many years do the best work of your life. When we bring you onboard, we expect you to change the company.

• Novel problems/solutions: We're a startup that's well funded, with cool problems, which lets us implement novel solutions! We abhor “busywork” and think, whether it's community, engineering, operations, etc there's always opportunity for creative and high leverage solutions.

• Growth: We want you to grow with us, but we know that talent is loaned, so when you figure out what area you want to grow in next, whether it's at Railway or outside, we'll make sure you land there.

How we hire

No tricks. No surprises. Here's the entire process.

1. Talk with us about the role

   • This is completely open ended and we're just trying to see who you are, what you want to do, and where you wanna go.

2. Work on a small project to discuss in the interview

   1. Review the Railway product and identify one improvement (a redesign of an existing area or a new feature that extends functionality). Then, implement one workflow to illustrate your idea—using either Figma screens, a clickable prototype, or code.

   2. Deliverable: One workflow in Figma screens, a Figma prototype, or an implementation in code that communicates your vision and design quality.

   3. You'll sit down with someone on the team and go over the above. We'll poke into your solution, as well as get you acquainted with two more members of the team.

   4. You can, and SHOULD! ask us questions ahead of time. What our prior solution looks like, what ideas we have to improve it, etc. Ask away!

3. Meet the Team

   1. You'll meet the Team, which will be comprised of 4 people from vastly different sections of the company.

   2. Looking for: How you work with the rest of the team and communicate.

4. Offer and Details Chat with CEO

   1. Finally, we will go over the process, the role, and hammer out the details about your position, onboarding, and all the deets.

Final Note: The interview goes both ways. Once again, please ask us things. Many things! Hard things. That's what we're here for.