Senior Platform Engineer

Role at a glance

What: As a Senior Platform Engineer, you'll own and scale the backend systems and data infrastructure that power Rally's core product — enabling our platform to handle hundreds of millions of participant records, billions of events, and the next generation of AI-native research workflows.

Impact: Your work will directly determine how fast Rally's product can move. You'll strengthen the systems that every product engineer builds on and ensure our platform can support the ambitious roadmap ahead.

Team: You'll join our Platform Engineering team — a small, high-ownership group responsible for the reliability, scalability, and developer experience of Rally's core backend.

Work style: Remote-first within the United States, with regular async collaboration and optional in-person team onsites.

The opportunity

Rally is in the middle of a massive shift in how companies run user research: from ad-hoc, one-off projects to continuous learning that informs every product decision. In this role, you'll help define what that future looks like — for Rally as a product and for the teams who rely on us to run research at scale. You'll join at a stage where we have strong product-market fit, a fast-growing customer base, and plenty of hard, interesting problems left to solve.

Rally's platform team owns the critical systems that power everything from participant outreach and scheduling to AI-driven research workflows. As we scale and build out our agentic platform, we need a strong backend generalist who can take ownership of high-impact systems and help the team move faster and with more confidence.

What you'll do

• Own and scale critical backend systems — including data sync pipelines, search APIs, email/SMS delivery, and workflow automation — with a focus on reliability and operational excellence.
• Drive platform-level projects that unlock new product capabilities: activity feeds, custom objects, rate limiting, tenant isolation, and data enrichment integrations.
• Collaborate closely with product engineers to identify and eliminate platform bottlenecks, improving the velocity and reliability of feature development across the team.
• Participate in the shared platform on-call rotation and lead post-incident reviews, improving system observability and resilience over time.
• Help shape the backend foundation for Rally's agentic platform — ensuring our core systems can support AI agents running research workflows at scale.
• Influence architectural decisions and establish engineering standards across the backend stack.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, technical design discussions, and day-to-day pairing as the team grows.

What you'll bring

• 6+ years of experience building and operating complex backend systems in production, ideally at a startup or high-ownership environment.
• Strong TypeScript/Node.js fundamentals with hands-on experience in a fully TypeScript codebase.
• Deep experience with AWS managed services (ECS/Fargate, RDS/Aurora, MSK) and modern cloud-native architecture patterns.
• Experience with event-driven systems and streaming infrastructure (Kafka or equivalent).
• Proven track record of owning significant technical areas end-to-end — from design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation.
• Strong understanding of observability (metrics, logs, traces) and comfort with on-call responsibilities and production incident response.
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset — excited to partner with product, design, and go-to-market teams, not just other engineers.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with workflow orchestration systems (e.g., Temporal) or distributed systems patterns.
• Experience with Elasticsearch or similar search infrastructure at scale.
• Exposure to AI-native product development or agentic workflow patterns.
• Experience as an early or founding member of a platform team — building standards and norms from scratch.
• Familiarity with GraphQL APIs and the Prisma ORM.

If you're excited about Rally and this role but don't meet every requirement, we'd still encourage you to apply! We're interested in what you can do, not just what you've done.

How we work

Rally is a remote-first company with teammates across the US and Canada. We default to async communication, use clear written documentation to keep everyone in the loop, and reserve meetings for collaboration, decision-making, and relationship building.

• Remote-first: Work from anywhere in the US, with core collaboration hours that overlap across US time zones.
• In-person connection: We bring people together for periodic team or company onsites to build relationships, do deep-dive strategy work, and celebrate wins.
• High ownership: You'll have real responsibility from day one and a lot of trust to figure out the best way to get to outcomes.
• Customer-driven: We talk to users constantly and use those insights to drive decisions across Product, Design, Engineering, and Go-To-Market.
• AI-native: We're building an AI-native product and operating like one internally. We expect everyone at Rally to be actively experimenting with AI tools, challenging how they work, and finding ways to move faster.

Compensation & benefits

Base salary range (US): $185,000 – $210,000 USD per year.

This range reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hires in this role across the United States. Within the range, individual pay is determined by factors such as job-related skills, experience, and location.

Additional compensation: This role is eligible for variable compensation (such as equity awards) in accordance with Rally's applicable plans. Any such compensation is not guaranteed and is determined at Rally's discretion under the terms of those plans.

Benefits for US-based full-time employees currently include:

• Competitive compensation and meaningful equity
• Flexible / unlimited PTO policy
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Parental Leave
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Home office set-up support
• Monthly remote work stipend
• Quarterly in-person team or company gatherings

Benefits may vary based on role, level, and location, and are subject to change as Rally grows.

Our hiring process

While the exact steps can vary by role, here's what you can generally expect:

• Initial conversation: A short call with our recruiting team to learn more about your background and share more about Rally.
• CTO interview: A deeper conversation about the role, your experience, and what success looks like in the first 6–12 months.
• Technical coding challenge: problem solving exercise with two different engineers. Our coding exercises will be based on challenging real world product problems rather than leetcode like questions. You'll be expected to use Javascript/Typescript to work across both the frontend and backend (API and DB level).
• System Design Challenge
• Team and cross-functional conversations: Time...