Backend Team Lead, Ruby on Rails

Before you apply

• We're direct about how we work. Read this section first.
• We value engineers who know what they don't know , and say so. If you're honest about your gaps, we'll invest in closing them. If you hide weaknesses or oversell your experience, you won't last here.
• We serve US clients in demanding, high-stakes environments. You'll be expected to hold your own on calls with senior technical leaders, not hide behind your manager. If that's not where you are yet, that's fine, but you need to own that gap and be hungry to close it.
• We move fast. Growth happens outside comfort zones. If this sounds harsh, we're probably not a fit. If it sounds like the environment you've been looking for, keep reading.

The role

Own technical design and delivery quality for complex Rails systems. Turn business goals into pragmatic architecture. Coach engineers. Keep performance, security, and operability non-negotiable.

What you'll lead

• Service architecture: API gateway, Rails API services, background workers, websockets
• Data plane: durable eventing, queues, back-pressure, exactly-once where it counts
• AuthN/Z and policy: JWT, mTLS, RBAC/ABAC, OPA/Rego policy checks

Data stores and models: PostgreSQL schema design, partitioning, migrations, indexing

• Caching and realtime: Redis for cache/pubsub; ActionCable or alternative WS hub
• Integrations: REST/XML adapters to external agencies and enterprise systems

Observability: metrics, logs, traces, red/black dashboards, SLO burn alerts

• CI/CD and environments: build pipelines, artifact signing, staged releases, rollbacks
• Reliability: incident response, on-call rotation, postmortems, runbooks

Core responsibilities

• Design and ship Rails API-only services with clean boundaries and idempotent endpoints
• Define protobuf/JSON schemas for events and external adapters. Version them.
• Stand up event streaming (Kafka or NATS JetStream) and DLQs
• Build background jobs (Sidekiq) and scheduled workflows with retries and circuit breakers
• Implement pagination, filtering, and consistent error contracts
• Enforce security: secrets management, mTLS, request signing, rate limiting, audit logging
• Implement data retention and privacy controls for media and PII
• Lead code reviews, pairing, and technical roadmap

Must-have experience

• 5+ years building production backends with Rails at scale. No exceptions.
• Designed multi-service systems with queues/streams and strong data modeling
• PostgreSQL/Supabase performance: query plans, indexes, partitions, and migration strategy
• Secure API design: OAuth/JWT, mTLS, key rotation, rate limiting, audit
• Realtime delivery: websockets or SSE at scale with fan-out control
• Observability and SLOs: RED/USE metrics, tracing, alerting that avoids noise

Nice to have

• Policy enforcement with OPA/Rego
• Media delivery basics (HLS/WebRTC) and large object handling
• Experience with public-safety or regulated integrations
• SBOMs, supply-chain security, artifact signing
• - Leading a team: setting goals, unblocking, code quality, and shipping on a cadence

What we offer

• Direct access to founder and CTO , no bureaucracy
• Real ownership of architecture decisions
• Investment in your growth if you're honest about where you need it

Apply through the form. We ask questions designed to surface how you think ,not how well you can prompt Generative AI tools like ChatGPT. AI-generated responses are rejected before a human sees them. Everything you write will be discussed in depth during interviews.