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.

The system you would own is a production Rails platform in parking management, covering payments, permits, and citations, with roughly 160 models, 231 controllers, and five API surfaces serving a dashboard, mobile, valet staff, kiosk devices, and machine learning integrations. It is not greenfield. It has users, it has history, and the work is to evolve it without breaking what runs.

• Location: Navi Mumbai
• Team: Engineering
• You would lead: the Rails backend work on this platform. Our test automation engineer reports into this role, and our full stack developers build alongside you on the same system.

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/USE 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
• Leading a team: setting goals, unblocking, code quality, and shipping on a cadence
• 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

Reviewing AI-written code

Your team uses AI coding tools and so will you. That moves the hard part of this job. Reviewing generated code takes longer than reviewing a colleague's, because it arrives with clean syntax and consistent naming, so the signals that used to make bad code obvious are gone. What hides underneath is a misunderstood requirement or an edge case nobody considered, and finding it means reconstructing what the change was supposed to do rather than reading it for style.

As the lead you own where that bar sits. You decide what gets merged, what gets tested first, and what nobody ships on a Friday. If you have opinions about this already, we want to hear them.

What we offer

• Real ownership of architecture decisions
• A short path from a decision to production, without approval theatre
• 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. A human reads every application, and answers that read as model-generated are tested in depth in the interview, where they do not survive. Everything you write will be discussed there.