Backend Team Lead — Ruby on Rails

Role

Own technical design and delivery quality for complex Rails systems. Turn business goals into pragmatic architecture; coach engineers; keep performance, security, and operability non-negotiable.

What you'll lead

• Service architecture: API gateway, Rails API services, background workers, websockets.
• Data plane: durable eventing, queues, back-pressure, exactly-once where it counts.
• AuthN/Z and policy: JWT, mTLS, RBAC/ABAC, OPA/Rego policy checks.
• Data stores and models: PostgreSQL schema design, partitioning, migrations, indexing.
• Caching and realtime: Redis for cache/pubsub; ActionCable or alternative WS hub.
• Integrations: REST/XML adapters to external agencies and enterprise systems.
• Observability: metrics, logs, traces, red/black dashboards, SLO burn alerts.
• CI/CD and environments: build pipelines, artifact signing, staged releases, rollbacks.
• Reliability: incident response, on-call rotation, postmortems, runbooks.

Core responsibilities

• Design and ship Rails API-only services with clean boundaries and idempotent endpoints.
• Define protobuf/JSON schemas for events and external adapters. Version them.
• Stand up event streaming (Kafka or NATS JetStream) and DLQs.
• Build background jobs (Sidekiq) and scheduled workflows with retries and circuit breakers.
• Implement pagination, filtering, and consistent error contracts.
• Enforce security: secrets management, mTLS, request signing, rate limiting, audit logging.
• Implement data retention and privacy controls for media and PII.
• Lead code reviews, pairing, and technical roadmap.

Must-have experience

• 5+ years building production backends, 3+ with Rails at scale.
• Designed multi-service systems with queues/streams and strong data modeling.
• PostgreSQL performance: query plans, indexes, partitions, and migration strategy.
• Secure API design: OAuth/JWT, mTLS, key rotation, rate limiting, audit.
• Realtime delivery: websockets or SSE at scale with fan-out control.
• Observability and SLOs: RED/USE metrics, tracing, alerting that avoids noise.
• Leading a team: setting goals, unblocking, code quality, and shipping on a cadence.

Nice to have

• Policy enforcement with OPA/Rego.
• Media delivery basics (HLS/WebRTC) and large object handling.
• Experience with public-safety or regulated integrations.
• SBOMs, supply-chain security, artifact signing.