Senior Ruby on Rails Engineer (Performance) - remote

Thinkific

Posted 4 years ago

We’d love to put your mind at ease while looking for a new opportunity during a pandemic.
Read about how we’re supporting #TeamThinkific during COVID-19 and how we’ve transitioned to working remotely.

Do you get excited about vastly improving performance in large complex products? Have you helped build a culture of performance and partnered with engineering teams to keep performance top of mind? Do you have a high attention to detail and a keen analytical mind? Does the idea of joining a rapidly growing tech company excite you? If yes, read on!

As a Senior Ruby on Rails Engineer (Performance) at Thinkific, you’ll work closely with our Product Ops and Devops/SRE teams, Principal Engineers and our CTO to do everything possible to eke out performance optimizations at every layer of our application from the front end to the database. You are an expert at identifying, measuring, analysing and improving performance bottlenecks. We have a highly engaged company that cares deeply about our customers— we believe building trust with our customers is one of the primary keys to our success and that’s where you come in. The reliability and speed of our product are of paramount importance when it comes to building and maintaining that trust.

In this role, you will:

Hunt down, benchmark, triage and improve performance bottlenecks within our applications, at whatever layer they might be found
Perform load tests to validate system performance and stability
Perform root cause analysis of performance issues and lead the implementation of corrective actions
Oversee system performance lifecycle and identify key metrics for performance improvements
Generate periodic performance reports for management review
Code review the code of your fellow engineers with a particular mindset towards the performance implications of changes
Participate in knowledge sharing activities with team members and provide mentorship for your fellow engineers

To be successful in this role, you must:

Have at least 8 years of experience as a software engineer working in a web application setting
Have a strong desire and proven track record of improving the performance of Ruby on Rails web applications using tools to benchmark performance through SQL analysis, writing or refactoring ruby code for performance and reviewing the code of other engineers from a performance perspective
Have at least 5 years of experience working with Ruby on Rails
Be skilled at performance benchmarking and optimizing SQL queries
Be at an expert level of knowledge for Performance Engineering, Test methods, and tools (JMeter, BlazeMeter, Gatling, Locust, Soasta or similar)
Demonstrate experience working with Git and source control practices
Have strong verbal and written communication skills

You might be the person we’re looking for if you:

Are eager to learn and grow—you’ve likely attended post-secondary education, continue to seek opportunities to level up your skills or have equivalent professional experience in a similar role
Can demonstrate that you're a performance thought leader within the Ruby on Rails community
Have experience optimizing PostgreSQL in a production environment
Are experienced in working within a multi-tenanted application
Are driven to continually improve by investing time in learning about new technologies and techniques and/or working on your own projects
Have been described as “organized and analytical with attention to detail”
Possess a lot of responsibility and autonomy—no one will be looking over your shoulder to be sure you’ve got it right!
Read our How we build at Thinkific blog and are excited about how we work, Blue Sky Week and the challenges we are solving for our customers

Bonus points if you:

Have experience analysing and optimizing performance at the network level
Are experienced in analysing and optimizing performance at the application server level
Have worked with GraphQL and/or Golang in a production setting

About us:

We’re about the results of online learning and the people along the way! Thinkific is a software platform that enables entrepreneurs to create, market, sell, and deliver their own online courses.

Our mission is no less than to revolutionize the way people learn and earn online by giving them the tools they need to turn their expertise into a sustainable business that impacts both them and their audience. We believe in meaningful, innovative work: we're building and expanding an incredible product that empowers course creators around the globe while working collaboratively to learn and succeed together. Together, we’ve served over 40,000 course creators and more than 10 million students, and these numbers are growing each day!

Why we think you’ll like working with us:

Read What to Expect when Applying at Thinkific to learn about our hiring process (and how we put candidates first!)
Be part of a team of incredibly talented, passionate, and driven people focused on building and innovating on a best-in-class learning platform
Make an impact with your work—each person has an equal opportunity to contribute to our goals and every day, we get to see how Thinkific is empowering both course creators and their students
Join one of the fastest-growing companies in Vancouver and find opportunities to grow in your own career—offering advancement opportunities for our team members is important to us!
Contribute to Thinkific’s award-winning culture—we’re one of Canada’s Most Admired Corporate Cultures and a certified Great Place to Work!
We offer competitive salaries, a comprehensive benefits package including health, dental, and vision coverage, and an Employee and Family Assistance Program to support the wellbeing of you and your family
Get additional health and wellness support through a lifestyle or health spending account to put your dollars where you need it most
Enjoy our open vacation policy and flexible work environment, because we know the importance of having a great work-life balance (and sometimes, you do your best work in slippers)
Learn and Grow is one of our values and we take it seriously, providing opportunities through lunch and learns, training, workshops, mentorship, and our $1500 education allowance
Our team spends time together outside of work, too—we have board game nights, have gone rock climbing, hosted family BBQs, a weekly cookie club (that’s right!), and each year, we host an annual retreat on Gambier Island
Grow your career AND your family at Thinkific—you’ll be taken care of with our parental leave top-ups as you add to your family
Our office is close to major transit routes, bike-friendly, and centrally located at the intersection of some of Vancouver’s coolest neighborhoods
Stay fuelled with healthy snacks, free coffee and tea, kombucha, and the occasional Friday beer and cider
Hang out with the @dogsofthinkific (and yes, they’re as cute and cuddly as they look)
Work with the hardware you’re most comfortable with, and upgrade or replace your system when you need to with our technology bonus
Stay fit with subsidized gym access or by joining one of Thinkific’s sports teams
Be confident bringing your whole self to work—we’re proud to be an inclusive company with a diverse team and values grounded in ethics and equality
Thinkific welcomes all applicants regardless of race, gender, orientation, sexual identity, economic class, ability, disability, age, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, or status. We believe that different perspectives and backgrounds are what make a company flourish and we welcome you!

This is an incredible role for the right candidate. We can’t wait to meet you!

Apply