Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby + Elixir)
Published on March 14, 2024
UpMail is a small SaaS business that builds email tools for Hotels. We are fully remote, focussed on engineering simplicity and good technical design. Much of our hiring process is open, with transparent salaries and process. We are hiring for high-autonomy engineers with an interest in architecture design and pragmatic development.
UpMail is a small SaaS business that builds email tools for Hotels. We are fully remote, focussed on engineering simplicity and good technical design.
Much of our hiring process is open, with transparent salaries and process.
We are hiring for high-autonomy engineers with an interest in architecture design and pragmatic development.
What does UpMail do?
We build email tools for hotels. Our customers use UpMail to improve large bookings (weddings, conferences) or to automate their day-to-day communications. We’re default-alive, with high growth over the last year, and getting our platform ready to scale into the next few years.
Practically this involves things like data ingestion, content management, automation, authoring tools, migrating legacy components; a varied mix of interesting problems.
Specific to Engineering, we’re also migrating our Javascript SPA to use “live” SSR tools (Ruby + Hotwire / Elixir + LiveView).
This is all in support of our product goal: iterate towards the next generation of content tooling.
Requirements
We are looking for a ruby developer with excellent asynchronous communication skills, who loves technical design and product-focussed work.
- You have 3-5 years experience in Ruby. Elixir experience not required, but is a bonus. (We expect to be writing Ruby for another 2 years as we gradually migrate to Elixir.)
- You enjoy long-form writing and asynchronous communication methods. E.g. you can create high-quality proposals, PRs, technical diagrams, etc.
- You are very pragmatic about technology, preferring to build something small. You choose boring options instead of clever ones. You remove requirements, you write less code.
- You enjoy technical design, the art of understanding a problem before finding solutions.
- You enjoy building in small steps, following the agile manifesto principals to iterate towards good software instead of trying to get things right the first time.
- You enjoy sharing you knowledge with others, and helping your peers.
⚠️ IMPORTANT: This role corresponds to a “3” across all levels of our Engineering Career Framework. This is how we evaluate candidates, please read the framework carefully.
Specific responsibilities for this level
- 30% of your time will be spent actively sharing knowledge. Reviewing PRs, providing feedback to more junior team members, reviewing peer proposals, etc.
- 30% will be spent on technical design. Refining requirements, writing long-form proposals, designing systems that are as simple as possible with few moving pieces.
- 30% is direct coding in Ruby.
- 10% is team reflection, improving processes, contributing to better dev experience, etc.
Benefits
- $400 per day freelance, or $89,000 per year with 30 days holiday*.
- Fully Remote - UTC timezone (overlap of 5 hours required).
- 4-day week is available (for pro-rated salary).
- Heavily supported career growth and mentoring with an experienced technical CTO.
- Learning budgets, with things like team discussions and book reviews.
(* Pay is yearly or daily depending on your jurisdiction and whether you want to be a freelancer or employee, we can support both. But: we are only hiring for long-term staff, not short term contracts or part-time work.)