Software Engineer (Infrastructure)

Job description

ABOUT CENTRALIZE Enterprise sales runs on relationships, and every tool built to manage them is a database from 2005. Reps lose seven-figure deals because they can't see who actually matters inside an account. We're building the system of intelligence that replaces the CRM. Centralize is the relationship intelligence platform for enterprise revenue teams. Webflow, Intercom, Brex, Cognition, LangChain, and Cresta use us to close their largest deals. We've grown 5x since last year, and customers are pulling us forward faster than we can ship. We just raised a Series A led by NEA, bringing our total funding to $18M+ alongside Salesforce Ventures, Y Combinator, and operators including Cal Henderson (Co-Founder, Slack), Noah Weiss (former CPO, Slack), and sales leaders from Figma, Box, Dropbox, Anthropic, and Notion. Centralize was founded by Rachit Kataria, a founding engineer on Facebook Shops who helped scale it to 250M MAUs, and Will Wang, who led the launch of Slack Huddles, the fastest-growing product in Slack's history. OUR BAR We stay small on purpose. No passengers, no politics, no waiting for permission or for someone else to fix what's broken. We own the unglamorous work alongside the exciting work. The 9pm customer request, the integration buried three layers deep, the bug nobody wants to touch. You go after it because it needs to get done, and because the next thing you build is better for it. You won't have the answers handed to you. The roadmap, the architecture, the right call on a customer request, you'll be the one figuring it out. We hire people who are energized by ambiguity, not slowed down by it. Your work shapes what Centralize becomes. THE ROLE We are hiring an infrastructure engineer to own scalability across Centralize. Our system processes millions of events per day from integrations across our customers' tech stacks and writes hundreds of millions of records into our pipeline. The infrastructure that makes that possible is yours to design, harden, and scale. You'll own Postgres, our job queue infrastructure, our backend architecture, and the systems that move data from customer integrations into the product. You'll work in AWS, OpenSearch, and Redis, and you'll be the person who decides how we scale from tens of thousands of concurrent jobs to whatever comes next. This role is well-suited to engineers who have already scaled fast-growing systems through their hardest growth phases and want to do it again, this time with full ownership and a small team that ships quickly. WHAT YOU WILL DO - Own the architecture and scalability of our backend systems, including Postgres, job queues, OpenSearch, Redis, and the data pipelines that move events between customer integrations and our product. - Scale our infrastructure from tens of thousands of jobs to orders of magnitude more, ahead of customer demand rather than behind it. - Make the tradeoffs that determine whether infra work takes weeks or months. We need someone who knows when to ship the duct-tape fix that buys six months and when to invest in the rewrite that buys five years. - Set the bar for reliability, observability, and operational excellence. You decide what "production-ready" means at Centralize. - Partner with Will on architecture decisions and with product engineers on the systems they build on top of yours. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE - Day 30: First major scalability win shipped, with measurable impact on throughput, latency, or cost. - Day 60: Owning the on-call rotation, observability stack, and capacity planning for our core systems. - Day 180: Our infrastructure handles 10x the load it does today, and you're already planning for the next 10x. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR - Demonstrated experience owning and scaling fast-growing production systems that process millions of events per day and hundreds of millions of writes. We need someone who has lived through the hard growth phases, not someone who has read about them. - Deep expertise in Postgres at scale, including query optimization, indexing strategy, replication, and the failure modes you only learn the hard way. - Strong fluency with job queue infrastructure, AWS, OpenSearch, and Redis. You know where each one shines and where each one breaks. - A sharp instinct for tradeoffs. Infra projects can take months. The best infra engineers know how to ship the 80% solution that captures most of the value in a fraction of the time, and how to recognize when the 100% solution is actually worth it. - Excitement about the scaling problem in front of us. You should want to take a small startup's infrastructure and turn it into something that handles massive scale, and you should want to do it as the person making the calls, not as one engineer on a team of fifty. - Excellent written and verbal English communication. You can document an architecture decision in a doc another engineer can read in five minutes. THIS ROLE IS NOT FOR YOU IF - You want to work on infra at a company that already has it figured out. Centralize doesn't, and that's the point. - You prefer to specialize in one layer of the stack. Our infra engineer touches Postgres, queues, search, cache, AWS, and the integration layer. - You optimize for the perfect long-term solution at the expense of shipping. Infra at Centralize is graded on impact per week, not architectural elegance. - You want a slower pace. We work hard and move quickly. Please only apply if that excites you. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS - Experience scaling B2B SaaS infrastructure through Series A to Series C+ stages. - Prior experience as the first or second infra hire at a fast-growing startup. - Background in integrations-heavy systems (Salesforce, Gmail, calendar, CRM data) where data quality and rate limits are first-class problems. - Experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch at scale. THE TEAM YOU'LL JOIN You'll work directly with Rachit and Will, alongside former founders and engineers from Coinbase, Gusto, Modern Treasury, and C3 AI. COMPENSATION AND LOGISTICS - Location: This role is open to remote candidates in the US, with a strong preference for candidates based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco or New York City. - Work Authorization: We are unable to sponsor visas. Candidates must have existing US work authorization. - Compensation: $190,000 to $260,000 base salary depending on level, plus 0.20% to 0.40% equity. Final offer calibrated to seniority and experience. BENEFITS - Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance - 401(k) - Parental leave - Unlimited PTO plus company holidays - Quarterly offsite - Equipment stipend