Senior Rails Engineer - remote

Resolve to Save Lives
Posted 2 years ago
We Work Remotely

Job summary

We’re looking for a Senior Rails Engineer to help us accomplish our goal of partnering with countries to save 100 million lives in 30 years. Our team provides software to support public health programs that aim to prevent cardiovascular disease. Read more about our work at Resolve Cardiovascular Health.

Our team developed Simple (simple.org), a free, open source app used by healthcare workers to better manage patients with high blood pressure. By allowing doctors to track patient care over time, we can help them control blood pressure and prevent heart attacks and strokes. Today, Simple is used by thousands of nurses and doctors every day, treating over 1.5 million patients across India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Sri Lanka, with all data owned exclusively by the countries themselves.

By joining our team, you will play a key role in helping us grow the software, keeping it fast and reliable while providing valuable data to public health programs we support. You will also help build and nurture the team, creating an engineering culture that is effective, supportive, and understands the big picture of what we’re working on.

Our team prides itself on:

  • Delivering fast, simple software used by healthcare workers in clinics every day
  • Working on solutions for tens of millions of patients
  • Building holistic products
  • Contributing to an open source project used in multiple countries
  • Open, honest, and supportive collaboration among designers, mobile developers, and Rails engineers
  • Shipping and iterating instead of chasing perfection
  • Ensuring patient privacy and data security

Our approach

Simple consists of a Ruby on Rails server that provides a web dashboard for public health workers as well as a sync API for the offline-first Simple mobile app.

The web dashboard provides aggregated reports at the regional and clinic levels, allowing public health officers to see what’s working and address program issues in the field. Our reports are used to help return patients to care, ensure drugs are in stock, and assist hospital administrators in staffing and training needs.

Here are some example projects that give you some idea of what’s in store:

  • Crafting dashboard charts and data pipeline that provide public health experts with a clear story of how patients and clinics are doing
  • Adding an A/B testing framework for discovering the most effective reminders for patients to return for care
  • Collaborating with our Android team to improve API endpoints and ensure they’re flexible and reliable
  • Performance profiling and alerts to ensure our app scales to tens of millions of patients over time
  • Improving how our app is deployed in AWS, on-premise servers in government data centers, and in other third-party cloud services

    User experience is critical to our success, so you will be working with our design team to make sure that we’re iterating quickly, as getting health data into official hands will help save lives. Our app needs to be easy to understand, for users and developers. Your work will have a real, tangible impact on peoples’ lives.

Mindset
We try hard to be a team full of empathy, inclusion, and respect. We trust each other, have hard conversations with open mindedness, and assume positive intent. We are a small team of self-directed people. Once familiar with the project, we expect engineers to be able to take ownership and guide large projects from start to finish. We write down ideas and work as asynchronously as possible, meeting via video conference when necessary. Proposing ideas and trying things matter more than always being right. We are frequently wrong and try to write code we can easily change when we learn new things. We’re excited for you to participate and look forward to helping you grow your own skills as well.

Diversity
Given that we’re writing software for the globe, it’s critical that our team represent the diverse environments in which we operate. We strive for an inclusive, diverse team with different perspectives, ideas, and identities.

About you

We are seeking an experienced candidate who is ready to do work that matters. The ideal candidate embraces learning about our challenges, has solved common Rails production challenges (especially at scale), and can work effectively with our entirely remote team.

Here’s what makes a successful engineer at Resolve:

  • Value simplicity over perfection
  • Be a problem solver and doer, take ownership of your work
  • Focus on outcomes instead of getting lost in details
  • Clear communications that empower and enable others
  • Ask for help when you need it
  • Coach, share knowledge, and nurture a supportive engineering culture
  • Don’t be afraid to try things and learn from mistakes
  • Set clear timelines and document progress
We’re keen to find someone for whom our problems look familiar. We seek someone who is just as comfortable slinging ERB views as they are optimizing query traces and setting up caching. Critically, we also want someone who is curious, writes and communicates well, can thrive while working asynchronously across many timezones, anticipates user needs from a human level, and always looks to keep things simple and iterate. We’re looking for someone who can self-manage, plans their time wisely, and delivers straightforward solutions to vague problems.

Required qualifications
Technical experience:

  • Very fluent with Ruby and Rails development
  • Strong understanding of Rails conventions and object-oriented principles
  • Knowledge of ActiveRecord, indexes, and caching
  • Embrace testing and continuous integration
  • Launched and maintained production Rails apps at scale
  • Hands-on architectural experience with modern cloud infrastructure and managing apps that are growing quickly
  • Supported production APIs and user-facing components
Location: This is a remote position. To ensure smooth collaboration with the team and responsiveness to our partners, we’re currently looking for engineers in India, Africa, and Europe.

Benefits
Resolve to Save Lives prides itself on cultivating a supportive, connected remote team that does work that matters. We do everything we can to make sure our employees are connected and are set up for success. We provide a generous package of benefits, including:

  • Strongly competitive salary aligned with national labor rates for the sector
  • Health insurance for you and your family
  • Contributions to retirement accountUp-to-date MacBook Pro with any peripherals needed
  • Annual professional development budget
  • 3 weeks of PTO, additional paid leave when the office closes for a week in the winter and a week in the summer, and safe+sick days and national holidays
  • Comfortable accommodations for any travel required
  • Regular (but optional) social events and celebrations