Full Stack Ruby Engineer

Company details

Description of the offer

Hello, we’re OpenPlay!

• We make enterprise web applications for record labels (music industry)
• Looking for full-stack Ruby engineers (Rails-like or Python/Django + want to learn Ruby)
• Would like 2 or more years of professional web development experience
• Positions are full time, fully remote and/or we have an office in Los Angeles
• Starting salary 100-150k (depending on experience) + benefits

• Participating in a weekly planning meeting where we review our goals and prioritize work to be done for the coming week.
• Participating in daily engineering-only meetings (roughly 30min) where the team collaborates on technical decisions, resolving issues, and reducing complexity.
• Writing tests: we write mostly full-stack integration tests and use a single testing framework for all parts of the code.
• Writing application code: mostly Ruby, some HTML, some Javascript. CSS is mostly handled by visual design.
• Reviewing code: We do round-robin code reviews as a means of knowledge sharing. All pull requests are reviewed by another engineer. You’ll take turns reviewing everyone else’s code and they will take turns reviewing yours.
• Deploying code: We deploy small changes to production code multiple times per day. Deployments are automated with lots of fail-safes and we rely on third party services for devops as much as possible.
• Maintaining code: Maintenance is a part of all code changes but we also plan specifically for improving code quality and updating to newer conventions, techniques, and technologies. You will also be reproducing and fixing the occasional bug.

• Estimating work to be done. Instead we try to break work down into small enough chunks that they can be done quickly.
• Reporting progress. Work is done when it’s deployed. Instead we try to reduce the scope of work that is growing complex.
• Stakeholder meetings. While agile processes are all about open channels of communication we find too much can be overwhelming. We have technical product managers who work with stakeholders instead, allowing everyone else to focus on their work while getting their questions answered.

• Relational database concepts such as: foreign keys, indexes, normalization and denormalization, SQL queries.
• Writing Ruby code in an MVC web framework. We don’t use Rails but we follow many of the same conventions. We’ve had success bringing people on from Python/Django so if you have Python experience and would like to learn Ruby it might be a good fit.
• Some familiarity with Javascript. We push as much behavior as possible to the server but features often do have small client-side components.
• Writing tests. We practice integration-test-heavy outside-in test-driven development. If you’ve practiced any sort of test-driven development you will pick it up fast.

• OpenPlay Music is a monolithic application backed by a PostgreSQL relational database. Heavy operations are processed asynchronously by scalable background workers that notify clients via WebSockets. At present we have plenty of room to scale.
• Our server-side code is MVC-structured and built on Sequel (ORM), Sinatra, and HAML. If you’re familiar with Rails (or similar MVC frameworks) you’ll find a lot of similarities and many of the same conventions here.
• On the client side we use StimulusJS to apply bits of dynamic behavior where it improves the user experience, most of which ultimately requests updates from the server.
• There are currently around 2500 full-stack browser-based integration tests covering every feature from user input to expected output. CI runs on every git push and completes in about 15 minutes.
• We do things typical of web applications like:
  • Store data in, and query from, a relational database (PostgreSQL)
  • Index data and query it with filtering and full text searching (Elasticsearch)
  • Handle slow tasks with background processing
  • Push asynchronous updates to clients with WebSockets
  • Export XML files, PDFs, CSVs, Excel spreadsheets, and other formats that just won’t seem to go away
  • Import data from Excel spreadsheets, (music-industry standard) DDEX XML, JSON, and various other sources
  • Communicate with lots of external systems across all manner of bespoke APIs
  • Provide JSON APIs for our customers to build on top of
  • Use git for version control, build features in branches, and take turns reviewing pull requests
  • Run everything on cloud infrastructure
  • Rely on service providers for devops as much as possible (Heroku, etc)

• Starting salary 100-155k depending on experience
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Whatever tools, services, books, etc you need to do your job
• Low stress environment: The industry we’re in is comparatively low scale and high value. While we work with lots of data we avoid some of the technical issues and constant urgency you might find with consumer applications.
• Good work/life balance: We expect that everyone works full time (40 hours/week). We do sometimes have deadlines and we haven’t always limited scope appropriately. The last time we worked late nights was in 2019 for about a week. The time before that was in 2016 for about 3 weeks. Our most recent deadline we met two weeks early.
• Flexible work and vacation schedule. You are free to work the hours that work best for you (outside of our scheduled meetings) and we don’t have a set limit on vacation days.
• Free to work remote. We’ve been doing remote work as long as we’ve been around and our process is built around it. Some of our team is permanently remote, others work out of the office part time.
• Office near the beach in Santa Monica you can use any time.
• Free lunch at nearby restaurants when you’re in the office. Some of which are delicious.

• Prior work experience that looks like it might be a good match for what you’ll be doing at OpenPlay.
• Some understanding of how to program well. Maybe a computer science degree or other academic background. Code contributions you can point to. Blog articles you wrote. A particularly enlightening reddit comment.

How to apply?