Ruby on Rails Developer - Lead
The posting does not state a salary. This range is our estimate from the role, the location and the stack — treat it as a guide, not an offer.
- Level
- Senior
- Apply from
- United States
About the role
- Lead development team with technical leadership.
- Design and develop scalable APIs and services.
- Mentor engineers and promote best practices.
- Manage multiple concurrent workstreams effectively.
- Drive quality and delivery velocity across projects.
Skills the posting asks for
- Ruby
- Ruby on Rails
- APIs
Summarised from the employer’s posting, which is reproduced in full below.
The employer’s full posting
We are looking for a seasoned engineer with deep Ruby expertise to lead our development team in building high-quality, scalable web applications. This role requires someone who can manage multiple concurrent workstreams, from backend platform development to front-end feature delivery, while providing hands-on technical guidance, architectural leadership, and mentorship across the engineering organization.
You will serve as the technical anchor for the team, driving quality and delivery across Ruby on Rails and modern full-stack technologies.
Responsibilities
- Technical Leadership & Architecture
- Lead and oversee the development team across multiple parallel workstreams, ensuring consistent quality and delivery velocity.
- Define and evolve the technical architecture across Ruby on Rails services and full-stack applications.
- Make pragmatic technology decisions that balance long-term scalability, maintainability, and near-term delivery needs.
- Establish and maintain technical standards, coding conventions, architectural patterns, and engineering best practices across the full stack.
- Conduct and contribute to architecture reviews, technical design discussions, and code reviews.
- Identify technical risks and drive solutions before they become delivery blockers.
- Multi-Stream Management
- Coordinate and prioritize work across concurrent tracks, including new feature development, platform hardening, bug fixes, and technical-debt reduction.
- Unblock engineers proactively by triaging technical blockers, breaking down ambiguous requirements, and converting complex problems into actionable tasks.
- Balance competing priorities while maintaining a clear focus on business outcomes and engineering quality.
- Track technical dependencies and coordinate effectively across engineering, product, QA, DevOps, and other stakeholders.
- Hands-On Engineering
- Remain actively involved in implementation, particularly for complex or high-impact technical areas.
- Design and develop scalable APIs, backend services, data models, and front-end applications.
- Write clean, maintainable, well-tested code primarily in Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
- Diagnose and resolve complex production issues and performance bottlenecks.
- Improve application reliability, observability, security, and operational readiness.
- Promote automated testing, continuous integration, and modern software-development practices.
- Mentorship & Team Development
- Mentor engineers across different levels and help them grow their technical and architectural capabilities.
- Provide thoughtful feedback through code reviews, design reviews, and regular technical coaching.
- Encourage knowledge sharing, documentation, and collaborative problem solving.
- Help establish a culture of ownership, accountability, engineering excellence, and continuous improvement.
- Delivery & Collaboration
- Partner closely with Product and Engineering leadership to translate business requirements into practical technical solutions.
- Participate in sprint planning, backlog refinement, estimation, and technical roadmap discussions.
- Communicate technical trade-offs, risks, dependencies, and progress clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Ensure solutions are delivered with the appropriate balance of speed, quality, scalability, and maintainability.
Qualifications
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant experience in full-stack development.
- Strong hands-on experience with Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
- Proven experience designing and building scalable, production-grade web applications and APIs.
- Demonstrated experience leading engineering teams or serving as a Tech Lead/Staff-level engineer.
- Strong understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, databases, APIs, testing, and system design.
- Experience working across multiple concurrent development initiatives.
- Strong problem-solving, communication, and stakeholder-management skills.
- Experience mentoring engineers and driving engineering best practices.