Senior Ruby on Rails Engineer - remote

Aha!
Posted 4 years ago

Aha! is the world's #1 roadmap software. We help more than 5,000 companies build lovable products and be happy doing it. Our company is self-funded and profitable, and has been entirely remote since we started in 2013.

Our team

Aha! engineering is a mid-sized, fully remote team that is highly productive. We are centered around North American time zones so we can collaborate during the workday.
  • We move quickly: We ship code multiple times a day. We believe in getting new features in front of customers and iteratively improving as we learn what works and what does not.
  • We collaborate: We each bring unique experiences and skills to the table. Working together to share that knowledge benefits the entire team and helps us produce the best results for our customers.
  • We value product over process: We want the team to have the time and focus to solve complex challenges. We aim to minimize the overhead introduced by heavyweight processes and excessive meetings.
  • We are happy: it is important to us that you love your job and are happy at work. Learn more about our company values. Check out our generous benefits.
  • We enjoy: We like what we do. And we want you to love your job too. Learn more about The Responsive Method, our company values, and the generous benefitswe offer. 

Our technology

Our sole product is the Aha! web application. It is a single-instance, multi-tenant Ruby on Rails monolith supported by Postgres (database), Redis (background jobs), and memcached (Rails caching). We also run a Node.js webserver to support collaborative editing and real-time updates. Our application is hosted on Amazon Web Services and architected with ECS for reproducibility and scalability.

We utilize a growing amount of React on the front end to build rich client-side experiences, including our fully collaborative text editor and our slide presentation editor. We balance the strengths of both technologies — Rails for its conventions and simplicity and React for more powerful interactive functionality.

We embrace new technologies that help us deliver a lovable product, but we also remain cognizant of the maintenance overhead that a new library or platform brings. We solve the problems in front of us rather than prematurely optimizing to address issues that may never materialize.

We do most of our collaboration and planning in Aha! itself, which we find especially rewarding. We also utilize GitHub, Slack, and GoToMeeting for video calls.

Your experience

We believe that being a kind person who elevates the rest of the team is just as valuable as writing great code. You have strong problem-solving skills and experience working on important functionality for a cloud-based product. You are humble, eager to learn, and always willing to help others learn as well. You want to work with people who enjoy picking up a problem and solving it, regardless of the technologies and techniques involved.

Most of our features involve writing significant Ruby on Rails code, so you have meaningful past experience working in a Rails codebase. We also write a lot of React, but we are happy to help you learn that part on the job.

Your work at Aha!

We work on a broad range of features across the full stack. Your work will include:
  • Implementing new features for our users, touching each layer of the MVC as needed
  • Building deeply interactive reporting interfaces using React
  • Working proactively with product and UX to refine and iterate on specifications as the feature takes shape
  • Investigating slow performance and optimizing queries to ensure Aha! is snappy and satisfying to use
  • Interfacing directly with users to quickly squash bugs as part of our regular customer support rotation
  • Documenting components in our style guide to help drive consistency

If this sounds appealing, we would love to hear from you. (A real human reviews every application.)