Backend Engineer (Rails, Mid-Senior)
Posted about 5 years ago
The Backend Team
The backend team consists of 5 people, with goals to double by January 2020. The team is responsible for building robust APIs to serve hundreds of thousands of users. Almost all features at Current involve the backend team. The team implements new ways for users to earn and spend their points and features to keep users excited and engaged in Current.
In addition to building features that our users love, there are a few behind-the-scenes projects currently in progress. We are…
- improving our infrastructure to handle 27x userbase growth over 3 months.
- detecting and preventing fraudulent use of Current.
- improving our earning algorithm to decide the right amount to pay each user.
- automating the product fulfillment process to reduce the time it takes for people to receive their gift cards or physical products.
The whole engineering/product team works in a typical agile setup. The team operates on 2-week sprints, with the regular planning and retrospective meetings. The backend team releases to production 1-3 times per week, and the iOS/Android teams release their work at the end of the sprint.
The team varies between working collaboratively and independently. We want everyone to feel encouraged to take a feature from idea through development and post-release all on their own. But, some problems are best solved together, in which case pair programming, whiteboarding sessions, and discussions are frequent.
Technology
We rely heavily on the following technologies:
- Ruby on Rails for our main application.
- NodeJS for a single microservice.
- Postgres for most of our persistent data store.
- AWS for our infrastructure.
- AWS API Gateway, Lambda, Kinesis, SQS, and DynamoDB for a high-throughput event pipeline.
- Sidekiq for asynchronous jobs.
- Swift and Java for our iOS and Android apps.
Role Expectations
You’ll be joining the backend team, working on one (or more!) of the areas/projects mentioned above. The specific projects will vary each sprint. As a member of the backend team, you’ll find yourself...
- taking projects from planning through technical implementation, deployment, and post-deployment.
- writing high-quality, stable, maintainable, and well-tested code.
- switching between working independently and collaboratively to complete projects quickly.
- meet and work with the product team to understand the customer’s needs.
We are looking for multiple mid and senior-level engineers to join the team. We offer a generous salary based on experience and location, which could be anywhere from $50,000 to $120,000 per year.
We'd love to talk with you if…
- the work sounds exciting!
- you’re excited to deliver high-quality features at a fast pace.
- you're passionate about automated testing and continuous delivery.
- you’re a clear, empathetic communicator.
- you have plenty of experience building robust and scalable products, including hands-on experience creating web applications with Rails.
- you're comfortable joining a team that is anticipating userbase 27x growth in 3 months (there will be a lot of problems to solve!).
- you have experience building large-scale systems that store and process lots of data (a plus, but not required).
- you have some experience with technical leadership (a plus, but not required).
Interview Process
The interview process is normally a 30-minute phone interview, a 1-hour technical design and culture fit interview, and a 2-hour technical interview. For the final interview, we will send you a product brief 24 hours beforehand to review and prepare an implementation plan. During the interview, we will review your plan together and ask you to implement a part of it in a shared coding editor.