Senior Platform Engineer

What: As a Senior Platform Engineer, you'll own the backend systems that make Rally's control plane trustworthy — governance, permissions, consent, and audit — so that every agent, MCP call, and API request follows the customer's rules, every time.

Impact: Rally's biggest customers trust us to decide who can be contacted and under what conditions. Your work will be the reason that trust holds as we scale agent-led research across thousands of product builders.

Team: You'll join Platform Engineering — a small, high-ownership group responsible for the reliability and correctness of Rally's core backend. You'll report to the Head of Engineering and work closely with the Data Integrity, Scheduling, and Agents teams.

Where: Remote-first across the US, with hubs in New York and Boston.

In a world where anyone can ship anything, the teams building closest to their users win. But talking to users is still much harder than it should be. Pulling lists, chasing consent, juggling calendars, sending incentives: it's why most product teams skip research altogether.

We're here to end manual recruitment.

Rally is agentic research infrastructure: the system that lets companies talk to their own users safely, at any scale. Tell Rally what you want to learn, and Rally Agent builds the study, finds the right participants, and handles outreach, scheduling, and incentives, all within your company's guardrails. It works from the Rally app, from Slack, or from the AI tools you already use. Agents handle the busywork, so people focus on the human parts: learning from each other.

Today, teams at Google, Meta, Figma, Ramp, Perplexity, and MongoDB run their research on Rally. And we're building a company that lasts, investing in the product and the team for the long haul.

We believe teams will always need to talk to their users, however far AI goes, and most companies still don't have a safe way to let more people do it. 2026 is the year that's changing. Rally Agent and MCP are live, and we're going after the biggest companies in our space. The product is catching up to the vision, with plenty of hard problems still ahead.

That's where you come in. You'd join our Platform Engineering team: a small, high-ownership group that's a little obsessed with our users. We work side-by-side with the researchers and product builders who use Rally every day, and yes, we use Rally to build Rally.

Our product is the control plane for user research: the layer that enforces governance, permissions, consent, and contact rules for every agent that touches a company's participants. As our customers grow — more participant records, more concurrent studies, more agents running research workflows — that layer has to scale while staying provably correct, observable, and fail-closed. We need a platform engineer whose instinct is data integrity and customer-facing reliability first. You'll work across the databases, data pipelines, indexing, and orchestration that our biggest customers depend on every day — helping the team make those systems trustworthy enough that enterprises hand us their most sensitive participant data without hesitating.

• Own and scale critical backend systems — including data sync pipelines, search APIs, email/SMS delivery, and workflow automation — with a focus on data integrity, consistency, and customer-facing reliability.

• Drive platform-level projects that unlock new product capabilities: rate limiting, tenant isolation, and scaling our databases and indexing infrastructure as customer data volumes grow.

• 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.

• 6+ years building and operating complex backend systems in production, ideally at a startup or high-ownership environment.

• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset — excited to partner with product, design, and go-to-market teams, in addition to your fellow engineers.

• Deep experience with distributed systems correctness: consistency models, idempotency, CDC pipelines, and fail-closed design in systems.

• Experience building or operating agentic or AI-native systems — understanding how to enforce rules, identity, and audit when autonomous agents are the callers.

• Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures and streaming infrastructure (Kafka or equivalent), workflow orchestration (Temporal or similar), and search infrastructure (Elasticsearch or similar) at production scale.

• Deep experience with AWS managed services (ECS/Fargate, RDS/Aurora, MSK, DynamoDB) and modern cloud-native architecture patterns.

• Strong understanding of observability (metrics, logs, traces), SLI/SLO design, and comfort with on-call responsibilities and production incident response.

• Comfort working through AI coding tools (Claude, Codex) as a core part of how you write, review, and ship code.

• 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.

• TypeScript/Node.js experience. Our codebase is fully TypeScript, but fluency in reading and reviewing it matters more than writing it from scratch.

Don't check every box? Apply anyway. We care a lot more about what you can do than a perfect match to a list.

This is how we work, and we want to be transparent from the get-go, so you can decide if it’s the right fit:

• Roles stretch here. Priorities shift as we learn, so you’ll often work outside a clearly defined lane.

• You’ll own your work end to end. That means from the first idea through launch and beyond, rather than handing it off along the way.

• We keep process light and teams small. You’ll have a lot of autonomy and fewer layers of support than at a larger company.

• AI is part of how we work every day. We’re constantly experimenting with new tools and rethinking our workflows, so curiosity and collaboration here goes a long way.

• We go to the source. When we have a question about what users need, we ask them directly.

• For this role: AI helps you move faster, and you still own the result. We’re looking for engineers who lean into AI tools and also understand, review, and stand behind everything they ship.

If that sounds like exactly the environment you’ve been looking for, we’d love to hear from you!

We're remote-first, but we're not strangers.

Async by default: We write things down, keep each other in the loop, and save meetings for decisions and real connection.

Together when it counts: We get together in person throughout the year to plan, build, and celebrate.

Owners, not order-takers: You'll have real responsibility from day one and the trust to figure out how to get there.

User first, always: We talk to users constantly, and it shapes every decision we make.

AI-native, inside and out: We're building an agentic product, and we work like it. Everyone here is experimenting with AI tools and rethinking how work gets done.

Base salary range (US): $190-210K

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.

We want you to feel taken care of, so you can do your best work. For US-based full-time employees, that includes:

• Competitive pay and meaningful equity

• Great medical, dental, and vision coverage

• 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave, for every parent

• Unlimited PTO (and we actually want you to use it)

• Home office and co-working stipends

• Mental health and wellness support

• 401(k)

• In-person team gatherings a few times a year

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

We want interviewing with us to feel like a preview of working here: structured, transparent, and focused on real work. Steps can vary a bit by role, but here’s the usual flow:

1. Recruiter chat (30 min): Get to know each other and make sure the role fits what you’re looking for.

2. Hiring manager conversation (30 min): Dig into the role, your experience, and what success looks like with our Head of Engineering.

3. Take-home project and walkthrough: Build a solution to a real product problem with the AI tools you’d use on the job. We look at how you steered your tools, not just the final code. Then you’ll walk us through what you built and why, including a few hands-on edits.

4. Final interviews: A system design session, a product conversation with our Head of Product, and time with our co-founders.

5. References and offer: We move fast here.

We’ll tell you what to expect at every step. And since we’re a research company, we’d love your feedback on the process too.

We're building a team that reflects the range of people who use products like ours, and we're committed to paying fairly for the work. 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 get in touch by emailing [email protected] 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 notice, and for any lawful reason or no reason at all.