Ruby on Rails Engineer (remote)

Location: Remote, however please bear in mind that we mostly work on a European timezone, and travel to our London office will be required periodically.

About Ably

As Ably continues to grow, we’re looking for talented and curious engineers to help us build and deliver systems to our customers all over the world.

Working at Ably means helping to build the infrastructure that will power and shape the future of the internet. We enable things like HubSpot’s chat and collaboration products, live scores for millions of Australian Open tennis fans, and real time transit updates for three million Chicagoans. Engineers at some of the largest companies in the world choose Ably because, when it comes down to it, we’re the only platform that dependably delivers on the most demanding realtime requirements at global, production scale.

The opportunity in front of us is immense. Our mission is to become the definitive realtime infrastructure of the internet while powering and accelerating the emerging ecosystem. We’re on track. Today we deliver billions of realtime messages to more than 50 million people across web, mobile, and IoT platforms. But we can’t rest yet. In five years we want to reach one billion people everyday.

To see what life’s like at Ably, check out our careers page at www.ably.io/careers.

Ably's engineering team

Ably’s engineering team is deeply technical, collectively bringing a wealth of experience and broad technology skills across infrastructure, security, distributed systems, and much more. The calibre of the code we produce is what excites and motivates us each day. If you enjoy solving hard distributed system problems that are mostly platform agnostic and theoretical in nature, then you'll love working at Ably.

In this role

You will be responsible for hands-on development and assisting the web engineering team to deliver our website, developer dashboards, common services, and provisioning APIs that our customers, developers like yourself, depend on.

Day to day, you will:

• Have a standup with your team to help everyone stay synchronized
• Performing code reviews on pull requests to help the team ship quality software
• Work with people from across the business to develop features that are valuable to ourselves and our clients
• Identify room for improvement, in our process and our code

It would be great if you have:

• Ruby. A minimum of four years professional experience using Ruby.
• Rails and web development. A minimum of four years of professional experience with Rails development. Although your focus will likely be primarily on the backend, you must be a proficient full-stack developer using HTML, CSS, Javascript. Experience using at least one frontend framework such as React or Angular required.
• Testing strategies. You must have a strong working knowledge and experience of continuous integration and testing frameworks with a pyramid approach (unit testing, integration testing, acceptance testing, etc).
• Architectural design and design patterns. You should have experience making architectural decisions for large web applications, and be well versed and a strong advocate of design patterns, where applicable.

It would be nice if you have:

• Experience delivering developer-focussed APIs, including API design, documentation and scaling
• Experience with infrastructure and distributed systems is beneficial
• Knowledge of realtime, event-driven and streaming protocols
• Experience with any of the other languages we use extensively at Ably: Node.js, Elixir or Go
• An interest in functional programming with Elixir or Clojure
• Our team are active open source contributors and are encouraged to do this as part of their role at Ably. We like new team members who enjoy contributing back to the open source community, even if those contributions are small
• Good grasp of Agile, Kanban and SCRUM

What’s it like to work at Ably?

Founded by two engineers who spotted a hard and largely unsolved problem, Ably is, at its heart, an engineering company. To provide the infrastructure required for a high-bandwidth, always-connected world, we hire engineers with a broad set of technical skills who are ready and capable of taking on challenging realtime engineering problems.

As a company and engineering team we’re committed to a future internet that’s open, with all engineers contributing to existing open source projects.

To provide the infrastructure required for the next generation of the internet, to tell the world about it, and to support everyone inside Ably to do so, we hire people who are ready and capable of taking on challenging problems in a high-growth environment.

We want to work in a company of inclusive people who treat each other well. To really thrive at Ably, you’ll need to believe in and be prepared to do your work in line with what we value, which is:

• Open for all: Open is a mindset. When open, we’re better collaborators, communicators and creators. Whether open source, standards, or protocols, open hearts, minds, and eyes. It’s better when it’s open.
• Bias for action. We avoid analysis paralysis at all costs. We lean into doing in order to move us forward. When we have enough of what we need to act, we act.
• Even the best do better. We want to be the best - but that doesn’t mean we rest when we are. Improvement and growth - true betterment - is an ongoing journey. One fuelled by curiosity and taking risks.
• Technology needs humanity. Our technology means little without people - whether that’s how we treat our colleagues, or how we design developer experiences. Being human matters.
• Dependable people make dependable things. Dependability is integral to our mission and technology, but being dependable starts with our people. When we care enough to take real ownership of our products and problems - all else will follow.
• The greatest rewards lie on the hardest paths. The bigger the challenge the easier the choice. We choose the path to build a truly exceptional product and culture because it always creates better outcomes, and is always what will set us apart.

What’s in it for you?

• A good, competitive salary
• A great company culture
• A remote first company. Unless you want to pop into our communal office space in Shoreditch, London, you'll work from home most of the time, apart from when we have planning sessions/company Summits which happen on average 4 times a year
• Health insurance, including Doctor@Hand
• Employee Assistance Programme
• ClassPass membership
• Cycle to work
• Regular company away days and social events
• Free drinks and snacks in the office
• Ongoing professional development (training, events, conferences), including an assigned budget
• 25 days of paid annual leave, plus bank hols
• Company contributions towards your pension
• Your choice of high quality tech kit to work on

Ably is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

If you enjoy working as part of a technology company, value open source, and love solving hard problems - then we’d love to hear from you, regardless of whether you fit the spec exactly or not. If in doubt, drop us an email; we’d be more than happy to give you some advice on your application.