**Role at a glance**
What: As Rally's founding Platform / Infrastructure Engineer, you'll take full ownership of our cloud infrastructure, CI/CD platform, and developer experience — building the foundation that lets our engineering team move fast, ship reliably, and scale into an AI-native future.
Impact: You'll be the dedicated owner of Rally's CI/CD platform, Terraform infrastructure, preview environments, and agentic platform foundations — building from the ground up and setting the standard for how we scale.
Team: You'll join our Engineering team as the founding member of a dedicated infrastructure function, reporting directly to a founding engineer Melvin, and working closely with leadership. You'll work closely with Platform and Product Engineers across the stack.
Work style: Remote-first and able to work within the US timezones, with regular async collaboration and optional in-person team onsites.
**About Rally**
Rally is the User Research CRM that helps product, design, and research teams talk to their users quickly, safely, and at scale. Our platform automates the unglamorous parts of research—participant recruitment, outreach, screening, scheduling, consent, and incentives—so teams can spend more time learning from customers and less time wrestling with manual workflows.
We're now building Rally's next chapter: an AI-native platform that handles the full research recruiting lifecycle, end to end.
Trusted by teams at Google, Adobe, Figma, GitLab, Webflow, and others. Backed by Y Combinator, Stage 2 Capital, and Canapi Ventures.
**About the team**
Rally Engineering is a highly collaborative, user-obsessed group focused on making research smoother for both our customers and their participants.
* We work closely with UX Researchers, Research Ops leaders, designers, and product managers at some of the world's most user-centric companies.
* We use Rally to build Rally — talking to our own users frequently, running studies on our platform, and feeding insights straight into the roadmap.
* We favor small, empowered teams, high ownership, and a tight feedback loop between customers, product, and engineering.
**The opportunity**
We're hiring our first dedicated infrastructure engineer to take Rally from 1→10 on platform maturity. You'll have end-to-end ownership of CI/CD, developer experience, cloud infrastructure, and the agentic platform foundations that will define Rally's next chapter.
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.
**What you'll do**
* **CI/CD:** Evaluate, select, and own Rally's CI/CD platform. Define and track DORA metrics to drive continuous improvement in delivery velocity.
* **Developer Experience:** Build on-demand ephemeral preview environments for a large service footprint that can't run locally. Improve inner-loop developer workflows: build times, local tooling, and service scaffolding.
* **Infrastructure ownership:** Own Rally's full AWS stack (ECS/Fargate, Aurora PostgreSQL, MSK, DynamoDB), and mature our Terraform IaC — modularization, drift detection, CI for infra changes. Own cost optimization and per-team cost visibility.
* **Observability & reliability:** Maintain and evolve Rally's Datadog observability stack. Build automation tools and runbooks to reduce operational toil and accelerate incident recovery. Drive post-incident reviews and translate findings into systemic improvements that prevent recurrence.
* **Security & compliance:** Container scanning, secrets management, IAM least-privilege enforcement. Support SOC 2 audit requirements as needed.
**What you'll bring**
* 5+ years in infrastructure, platform engineering, or SRE
* Deep AWS experience: ECS/Fargate, RDS/Aurora, MSK, DynamoDB
* Production Terraform with a track record of improving IaC maturity
* CI/CD platform experience
* Strong observability fundamentals
**Nice to have**
* Early/founding platform team experience
* Node.js/TypeScript familiarity (Prisma, GraphQL)
* Kafka or equivalent event streaming operations
* Temporal or similar workflow orchestration
* Deploying Ephemeral/preview environments for complex distributed monolith architectures
* FinOps practices and cost tooling
* Edge/CDN deployment (CloudFront, Cloudflare Workers, Vercel)
**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 offsites 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): $190,000 – $225,000 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 offsite + annual company gathering
Benefits may vary based on role, level, and location, and are subject to change as Rally grows.
Rally strives to recruit and retain exceptional talent from diverse backgrounds while ensuring pay equity across our team. Our salary ranges are based on competitive market data for our size, stage, and industry, and may adjust over time as the market evolves.
Rally is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.
We're committed to providing reasonable accommodations to candidates with disabilities throughout the application and interview process. If you need support or an adjustment at any point, please email us and let us know how we can help.
This job description is intended to describe the general nature and level of work for this role. It is not a complete list of all responsibilities, duties, and skills required. Employment with Rally is "at will," which means either you or Rally may terminate the employment relationship at any time, with or without cause or notice, subject to applicable law.