Lead Ruby on Rails Developer

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No matter if you already like what you see or if you have ideas on what could be improved, we'd love to talk with you if you are an experienced Ruby on Rails developer who's ready to take the next step as a Product Tech Lead . Work with us to achieve great things, influence product decisions, and guide our tech direction

Activities

• Develop and Lead: Build and maintain product features while guiding your team in technical decisions. In this role, you will take over an existing team and lead them to success. We already have three existing product teams, and you will be leading one of them. You'll work in a small, agile, cross-functional team alongside a product manager, designer, and other developers. Each team autonomously defines and delivers valuable features to our customers. We use Scrum in 2-week sprints.
• Be Part of the Product Trio: Collaborate closely with the Product Manager and Product Designer as part of the "Product Trio." You'll influence what we build and how we build it, contributing to product discovery, technical feasibility, and strategic prioritization.
• Note on time commitment: You'll spend around 70-80% of your time contributing directly to the code and 20-30% collaborating as a tech lead with the product team.
• Technical Excellence: Balance feature development with maintaining a healthy codebase. You'll help shape technical roadmaps, prioritize tech debt, and ensure sustainable architecture. Our Ruby on Rails backend has 100% test coverage, and we aim to run on the latest major versions of core dependencies.
• Mentorship & Leadership: Support and guide developers on your team and beyond, fostering technical growth and strong engineering practices. Help remove roadblocks during sprints to ensure smooth delivery.
• Bridge Between Product & Development: Act as the crucial link between the product trio and developers within your team, ensuring smooth collaboration and mutual understanding. Additionally, foster cross-team alignment on technical decisions, participate in sprint planning, and contribute to a cohesive engineering culture across the organization.
• Remote-First & Global: Most of our R&D team is remote, and all important meetings are remote-first. While you can work remotely, you're also warmly invited (though not required) to join us at the office in Heidelberg multiple times a year for OKR strategy meetings, as well as for our fun summer and winter events. Our company language is English.

Our Tech Stack

• Backend: Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, RabbitMQ, GraphQL
• Integrations: ChatGPT (AI), Klaviyo (Emailing), Google BigQuery (Data Warehouse)
• DevOps: GitLab CI/CD, fully automated deployements to Kubernetes with Helm and Terraform
• Frontend: React, TypeScript (JavaScript), Sass Modules, shared component library as npm package, react-query, zustand, zod, JSON-API. In parts also GraphQL and Next.js

Requirements

• At least 3 years of hands-on experience with Ruby on Rails . Experience with React is a plus.
• Strong knowledge of Ruby libraries (rspec, devise, sidekiq, searchkick), design patterns, and RESTful APIs.
• Experience with modern development practices (test automation, version control, Agile/Scrum).
• Leadership mindset: Ability to guide technical decisions, mentor developers, and collaborate effectively with product managers and designers.
• Interest in a startup environment, shaping not just the product but also the processes and team dynamics.
• Open to working as a full-stack developer if you'd like, but with a backend focus.

Team

We're a fun, diverse team from originally 14 nations , speaking English and passionate about delivering great software. Our R&D team has around 30 people, including engineers, data scientists, and product folks.

We work in small, cross-functional product teams that own specific product areas. Each team consists of a product manager, a product designer, and 3-5 developers. We collaborate across teams for technical tasks and work closely with data science and other departments.

The teams work in two week sprints for product issues, where we also allocate around 20% of our time for technical tasks which we together (across teams) prioritize. We use scrum to structure our workflow. While each team can work independently, you will of course also collaborate with members of the other teams for technical tasks, as well as collaborate with our data science team and other departments for some features.

Application Process

1. Screening call with HR.
2. Technical interview with our hiring manager, Patrick.
3. Take-home assessment task.
4. Final interview to discuss your assessment task.
5. Meet the team to get to know your future colleagues.

We hire fully remote , but if you're local or can visit our office in Heidelberg, we'd love to meet you in person

Ready to build, lead, and grow with us? Apply now and let's create something amazing together