Ruby Backend Engineer
Remote - North America
Remote - South America
Remote - Portugal
Remote - US
Remote - Canada
Full Time
Mid Level
Published on January 27, 2023
Evil Martians are looking for a fully remote Ruby Backend Engineer for the distributed team. We provide work permits and relocation to Portugal or Japan. The salary shown here is “gross” salary (before tax deductions).
Evil Martians prioritize developer experience, and humane, professional relations within the team. We offer a lot to our engineers, both professionally, and we also provide benefits beyond just compensation, here's a quick rundown:
- We prioritize engineering culture while achieving customer success. Martian engineers help choose the most interesting projects. Engineers do not report directly to account managers, and account managers build professional, welcoming environments with clients.
- We have numerous brilliant engineers. If you’re familiar with the open source world, you may recognize some names. We’d love to help you grow in the open source community, too. If you’re already experienced, there’s also lots of room for you to help our rising web development stars.
- Evil Martians is an international company headquartered in New York. If you're looking to relocate, we have offices in Portugal and Japan; we'll help you make the move and provide work visas. Or, if you're looking for a purely remote role, you'll find a home in our globally-distributed team.
- Martians have been fully remote for over 15 years. We know how to manage a distributed, asynchronous-first team without micromanagement.
- The team comes first, even with business matters: for instance, all key business decisions are discussed openly and every team member can have an impact. Our finances are also made completely transparent for employees.
- If you plan to create an open source project, we can share our experience and help you with company resources. You can also pitch your product idea (open core, COSS) and the company may back you and invest in a joint product.
- We can help you grow professionally, and amplify your voice: we’ll assist you applying for, practicing, traveling to, and giving talks at conferences. We’ll guide you writing articles for our blog (often appearing in Ruby newsletters and Hacker News). We’re happy to help you organize and give lectures during our own educational courses.
- For those who work with us for several years, we offer sabbaticals (with pay) of up to 3 months.
- We have a revenue share model in place for the entire Martian team: every year, a portion of the company's revenue can be distributed between employees.
- Additionally, we offer medical insurance, English courses, reimbursements for hardware and educational courses and materials.
Here's why you should consider a career with us
- We’re proudly one of the oldest, most respected Ruby and Rails consultancies. Rubyists know us from our open source (Ruby gems, Rails and Ruby commits), our talks at conferences and meetups, and from our blog, the Martian Chronicles.
- Evil Martians is a product development consultancy that works with startups and established businesses while also creating open source-based products and services. We’re a reliable product development partner, responsible for product development and engineering tasks from product roadmaps with measurable targets, design, release planning, iterative development, deployment and service reliability engineering.
- Our clients are based in the USA and Europe. We work with series A/B global startups, Y Combinator alumni, as well as huge internet companies and enterprises launching spin-offs and “internal startups”. We can have a direct, positive effect on global products and engineering culture in these companies.
- We’ve worked with giants like eBay, Gett, Groupon, and Fountain, developer tools like HTTPie, Akeero, and Teleport, and we've helped startups like Tines and Podium find success.
- Most Martians can code, including founders, managers, and designers. We love using and producing open source, and sharing our code and experience with the community: check our open source projects and our blog.
What we’d like from you
- Fluent Russian would be a big advantage for communicating with our Russian-speaking teammates in Europe, the US, and Japan.
- Advanced knowledge of Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Experience with organizing (large) code bases in a clean and maintainable way, experience with testing and profiling Ruby code.
- Experience optimizing Ruby and Rails applications, detecting and fixing performance “bottlenecks”, dealing with emergencies, and doing so together with our SRE team, if needed.
- Advanced knowledge and optimization experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, specifically), and some experience using non-relational databases (Redis, Elasticsearch).
- Be ready for code bases of varying age. Sometimes we start projects with a clean slate, sometimes we must improve a legacy code base to optimize it and bring in modern code and software engineering practices.
- Be a programming language polyglot (or willing to become one). Besides Ruby, we have Go, TypeScript, Elixir and Rust on our project backends—sometimes for microservices, sometimes entire projects are written in non-Ruby languages.
- English communication skills; in particular, written English skills are a hard requirement, but if you're lacking a bit with speaking, we can help you improve. In general, great English speaking skills, alongside a readiness to use it to communicate, ask questions, and show genuine interest in our projects and planning are a huge plus.
- You’ll need to devote at least a few hours each day for communication with clients and teams that work in the following time zones: PST, EST, and CET.
- Able to work asynchronously. Be able to document your ideas, questions and solutions, and self-manage planning. Take proper ownership of your tasks, deliver them on time. Communicate when things go wrong and make sure everyone is on the same page when plans change. Don’t hesitate to ask for help or come up with ideas to improve the development process.
“Those requirements seem tough... I'm probably not good enough.”
We’ve heard that one before—especially from people who are now working with us. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you deeply love programming and you’re willing to learn—especially if you already have an open source portfolio. We love open source and your contributions will most likely count as interview bonus points!
How to Apply
Please send an email by clicking below; put “Ruby” and your name in the subject field.
We're not looking for a typical CV or overly formal cover letter. Instead, tell us your real story: your experience, interests, your previous projects, and your role (what did you do or achieve).
Notice: As a starting point, we need to see some sample code. You can send us links to your GitHub projects or Pull Requests. You can also create GitHub Gists to send us code samples from your closed source projects: something that solves a non-obvious, advanced task, or examples of beautiful code. Ideally, you would also describe what the code does, include tests, and a general description of the feature or the problem relevant to the code.
Notice: As a starting point, we need to see some sample code. You can send us links to your GitHub projects or Pull Requests. You can also create GitHub Gists to send us code samples from your closed source projects: something that solves a non-obvious, advanced task, or examples of beautiful code. Ideally, you would also describe what the code does, include tests, and a general description of the feature or the problem relevant to the code.
Next steps
- We check out your code snippets—or ask for a few more samples.
- A technical interview via Zoom. Important: we will NOT ask you to participate in stressful “whiteboard” programming, nor do we ask lame, dated “puzzle” interview questions. We’re interested in your knowledge, experience and potential.
- A take-home test task. Usually we’ll ask you to write a new library (Ruby gem) or make a pull request for an existing open source project. We’ll strive to provide good feedback throughout the process, and, if the task is generally complete but still requires some changes, the chance to improve it. Beyond the interview, you could use the result of this task to extend your personal open source portfolio; sometimes these become proper, valuable projects in the Ruby community, or valued as important changes to existing libraries. Some ended up in the Ruby Weekly newsletter.
- Final interview with Evil Martians’ CEO.