Senior Back-end Engineer (Ruby/Rails)
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Pilot (YC W17) is looking for an experienced Back-End Engineer, with experience working on complex B2B products, to join a growing team on a mission to create a more open worldwide job market.
A bit about who we are
Pilot helps companies to handle payroll, benefits, and compliance for their remote teams. We believe that your opportunities in life shouldn’t be dictated by where you’re from or where you happen to live, and we’re helping our customers live by that too. We’re backed by Sam Altman, Y Combinator, Credo Ventures, Automattic, Kyle Vogt, and many other amazing investors.
What you will be working on
We’re looking for a Senior Back-end Engineer to join our team—we need you to help build Pilot as the platform for all companies to hire anyone, anywhere. As a Pilot engineer, you’ll join a small but capable product team to develop new products and features as well as work to improve our existing offerings.
Most of our code is in Ruby—we use Rails 7.0 with bits of React on the front-end. Our primary database is PostgreSQL with Redis as a worker backend and RabbitMQ as a message queue broker.
We have a distributed data model with multiple applications communicating with each other using both asynchronous(events) and synchronous means. We deploy our apps to Heroku.
We have a pretty lightweight process: 1-week sprints, weekly planning sessions, and asynchronous progress updates. We use Slack, Linear, Tandem, and Zoom to communicate and plan our work. We enjoy working together as a team, but there are also a lot of opportunities to work autonomously. You can find more information about our tech stack and the way we work here.
Requirements
- Experience in building complex enterprise products at a startup pace.
- Proficiency with Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
- Working understanding of React (nice to have: TypeScript) in order to modify existing components. We use React sparingly, and we won't expect you to implement complex new components.
- Excellent oral and written communication skills. You’ll be working with a distributed team, so first-class communication is a must.
- Experience and desire to work in distributed teams. Expect your teammates to be all over the world.
- You’re interested in software architecture and distributed systems
- You enjoy working on internal libraries/frameworks
- You have practical experience implementing microservices
- You have domain knowledge in HR tools, payroll, or fintech.
- Complete onboarding and get familiar with our vision, strategy, and current objectives
- Be a part of our buddy system and work with a dedicated person that can help you whenever you need
- Learn our architecture and the problem domain from the rest of the team
- Implement your first pull request and push code to all Pilot users
- Become an important part of our engineering culture by reviewing code and participating in architectural sessions
- Scope and collaborate on new features together with other engineers, designers, and our product team
- Be familiar with our incident response process and able to help customers or the other teams at Pilot if they find defects in our apps
- Have made a visible impact on our customers
- Suggest or discuss improvements to our engineering processes during our weekly company-wide engineering meetings
- Drive engineering efforts autonomously even in the most important areas of our product
- Own several key features either from a front-end or back-end perspective, or both
- Understand the product at scale and be able to detect bottlenecks and come up with improvements
- Be the most knowledgeable on at least a few initiatives to improve our code base or processes
- Mentor other engineers on the team
We’d especially like to talk to you if:
In the first month, you’ll:
Within the first three months, you’ll:
Within 6+ months, you’ll:
Benefits
- Competitive salary and stock packages: $75,000-$101,000/y, equity: 0.05% - 0.125%
- Flexible working hours
- Unlimited vacation policy
- Health insurance coverage
- Parental leave
- Company hardware (Computer + other equipment)
- Ability to work remotely from anywhere in the world
- Opportunity to join an early-stage startup with high growth potential
We try to hold most of our team meetings between 7 am–9 am PST / 4 pm–6 pm CET / 11 pm–1 am JST to accommodate as many time zones as possible.
Even if you don't check all the boxes but think this role might be a good fit for you, please get in touch. We’d love to hear from you! At Pilot, we hire great people with various backgrounds from all over the world. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for everybody. If you'd like to learn more about us and the company's culture, head to our Careers page. 👋
