Principal Ruby Engineer

Own your future

Our culture isn't something people join; it's something they build and shape. We believe that every person deserves to be heard and empowered. If you're on the fence about whether you're a fit, we say go for it. Let’s build something great together.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead technical strategy, architecture, and modernization initiatives for the Composer platform.
• Drive decoupling and migration efforts from legacy application dependencies while maintaining platform stability.
• Improve platform reliability, scalability, observability, and operational resilience.
• Establish engineering standards related to instrumentation, monitoring, alerting, and system performance.
• Lead architecture review practices and collaborate with cross-functional engineering teams on technical decisions.
• Support distributed systems and containerized application environments.
• Provide technical mentorship and guidance through code reviews, design feedback, and engineering best practices.
• Utilize AI-assisted development tools to support codebase navigation, modernization, and platform evolution.

Must have:

• 12+ years in software engineering, with the last 3+ years as a Principal, Staff or Architect-level individual contributor who owned the technical direction of a product or platform across several teams
• Expert Ruby on Rails on large, long-lived, multi-tenant codebases (7+ years), including major Ruby and Rails version upgrades on a live system
• Led an incremental modernization of a legacy monolith while it kept shipping (module boundaries, service extraction, removing legacy dependencies, data migrations)
• Production ownership: led incidents and root-cause analysis, set observability and alerting standards, owned release readiness on a fixed release cadence
• AWS in production (EC2, Kubernetes, managed databases) and close work with an infrastructure team on CI/CD, scaling and security
• Security and compliance in practice: vulnerability remediation against deadlines, RBAC and data access rules enforced in the backend, audit requirements
• PostgreSQL or MySQL depth: query performance on large tables, indexing, large data migrations
• Working knowledge of React and TypeScript, enough to review and guide front-end work
• Daily use of Claude Code or similar AI coding agents, and experience setting them up for a team on a legacy codebase (context files, knowledge base, review rules)
• Client-facing technical leadership: presented architecture trade-offs, estimates and risks to a client's executives and engineering leaders, and defended a recommendation
• Advanced English (C1), written and spoken

Nice to have:

• FedRAMP, SOC 2 or other regulated or government cloud environments
• Built LLM features or MCP servers on top of an existing product (tool design, permissions, async jobs for long-running work)
• Java or Elixir services; Python/Django
• Data platforms: ETL pipelines, data warehouses, Starburst/Trino
• HR tech, recruiting, CRM or scheduling domains
• Consulting background: ran a technical assessment of a client platform, scoped and estimated fixed-price work

‍