Experienced (freelance) Rails engineer

NOTE: This is a 6-month project.

We start with the cliff notes about the position. If this appeals to you, continue reading for a longer text about working at Silverfin and your role 👇

• Actual, proper work-life balance
• A salary range of €99.000 - €134.000 a year
• Flexible working hours and work 100% remotely
• Join a distributed remote-first engineering team with 35 colleagues in 14 different countries on two continents
• A refreshing work environment with professional, friendly and welcoming colleagues

• You'll help out our existing teams while they're working on a big customer project 
• This can span from helping with setting up an integration with an external system to helping with internal billing 
• The project is going to last 6 months

• You’re experienced in both Ruby and Rails, and also understand where the boundaries lie between them.
• You can code in Ruby without any of Rails’ training wheels if necessary.
• You have some experience using Javascript framework(s), understand the value of them, but also know when plain Javascript is enough.
• You can communicate clearly in English, both in writing and verbally.
• You can start soon - our project is ramping up, so we can use your help as soon as possible.
• You know and can apply best practices when relevant. That means the usual like version control, testing, and refactoring; but also higher level concepts such as good object oriented design.
• You're aware of the trade-offs involved in proper engineering and can make balanced business decisions, keeping in mind all the stakeholders of the project. 
• If you’re any good at Ruby, this is probably not the first job ad you’ve seen, so we’ve done our best to stand out while also accurately presenting what we’re all about. If it sounds like you would enjoy working with us, don’t hesitate to apply or drop us a line with questions on [email protected], or read on for the more detailed explanation .. 

We work in nimble teams around 5 people in size, with each team taking ownership of a specific set of features of the application. Teams are responsible for a full slice across the stack, so both the backend as well as the frontend of each part is maintained by the same people. Three of our teams are set up as cross-functional product teams, working very closely with product manager and product designer, to understand the users and deliver the best value. Next to the product teams, there are four more platformy teams, who own complex subsystems, like syncs or AI, and / or support the product teams with knowledge, frameworks and services.

Our ops team ensures things run smoothly, deploys happen correctly, and will work with you when issues should arise. We’re enthusiastic followers of the devops mindset, which means ops and developers work together to solve problems, and empower each-other to be self-sufficient, instead of throwing problems over the wall to the “other side”.

We run an up-to-date Rails monolith on the backend, with PostgreSQL and Redis for persistence and caching, and everything is running on a Kubernetes cluster in Google Cloud. Our daily tools include GitLab, Quip and Slack, with Google Meet as our remote conferencing tool of choice. 

No code gets deployed without a code-review by a peer and testing is a must. Our pipeline automates deployment when the suite is green, and deploys happen dozens of times a day. Each team is currently doing Kanban, but they’re free to follow whatever process suits them best. There are regular retros held to work towards continuous improvement.

Software for accountants is not considered to be very exciting, but we have our fair share of technical challenges. To give you a sense of scale: our database exceeds 10TB*, and our largest table has crossed the 10 billion row mark a long while back. We interface with more than 30 different external APIs, and provide third parties an API of our own.

*: Our ops team noted that this actually isn’t that hard to achieve if you’re just indexing everything, but it still sounds impressive, right?

We’re a remote-first engineering team of 35 people distributed in 14 different countries over two continents. A priority for us is maintaining proper work-life balance. We avoid meetings as much as possible, accept deadlines only when absolutely necessary, and never expect anyone to work longer hours than they’ve signed up for. A day in our working lives is pretty boring, and we feel that’s exactly how it should be.

Working with us means you can be flexible with your schedule. It’s OK to disappear for a few hours in the middle of the day to run some errands, get a haircut, pick up the kids - whatever reason, you don’t need to explain yourself. 

Being remote-first means we favour asynchronous communication. We don’t shy away from chatting in Slack, but the important decisions or discussions are done in Gitlab issues, over email, or in Quip, so there’s a written, persisted record. We’re mindful of maintaining long chunks of focussed time, which means we avoid @-mentions or PMs on Slack, and other triggers and interrupts. We encourage using Slack’s DnD function, especially when you’re not working!

• You have at least 5 years of experience working with Ruby, or 3 years of experience with Ruby and 4 years in one or more other programming languages
• You get Rails
• Your work hours have some overlap with EU business hours (we require your local timezone to be within CET +/- 3h)
• You can communicate clearly in English, both written and verbally

• Experience as a remote worker in a fully remote team
• Experience working with large datasets and the problems they bring
• You have some experience using Javascript framework(s), understand the value of them, but also know when plain Javascript is enough
• Experience in Fintech
• Accounting knowledge

These would be nice but are definitely not necessary. Don’t worry if none of the above applies to you.

You can apply today and we’ll start having interviews from 05/08/2024. There’s no benefit to applying early, so you can take your time answering the application questions.