Ruby on Rails Developer

Search26; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Search26 is hiring Ruby on Rails Developers at Senior and Lead levels in Central London. You’ll be hands-on, coding daily while defining architecture, engineering standards, and code quality.

The team is migrating from Rails 5.1/Ruby 2.6 to Rails 8/Ruby 4, with AI features on the roadmap and a strong emphasis on scalable cloud infrastructure. You’ll contribute to architectural decisions, set coding standards, and guide the engineers as the new platform and processes are established.

Qualifications

• Proven experience building and shipping Ruby on Rails applications.
• Ability to drive architectural decisions and set engineering standards.
• Leadership experience in hands‑on technical roles without formal people management.
• Strong focus on code quality, testing, and maintainable design.
• Knowledge of AWS or cloud infrastructure for scalable Rails apps.

Responsibilities

• Hands‑on coding on a daily basis while guiding architectural direction.
• Own architectural decisions and engineering standards for the platform.
• Mentor engineers and raise the bar for code quality and deliverables.
• Shape how the new platform is migrated from Rails 5/Ruby 2.x to Rails 8/Ruby 4.
• Collaborate across squads to integrate AI features and cloud infrastructure.

Skills

Ruby on Rails

Architectural decision making

Technical leadership

Code quality

AWS

Job description

Ruby on Rails Developers (Developer, Senior & Lead Levels) — £70,000–£130,000

Central London | Hybrid | 3 days

I’m working on multiple Ruby on Rails opportunities with a growing technology business that is going through a really interesting stage of its engineering journey.

They’re bringing engineering fully in-house and building a permanent team from the ground up.

The existing platform is built on Rails 5.1 / Ruby 2.6, but a new Rails 8 / Ruby 4 application has already been built and the team is now starting the migration across.

This role will play a big part in deciding how that new platform is built.

You’ll be hands‑on technically, writing code most days, while also taking ownership of architecture, engineering standards, code quality and the way the wider team develops.

You’ll be working across:

• Ruby / Ruby on Rails
• AWS / cloud infrastructure

The team is also building out a number of AI features, so there’s plenty of opportunity to influence how AI is actually incorporated into the product rather than it being something bolted on later.

These aren't people‑management roles. They’re very much a hands‑on technical leadership position for someone who enjoys making architectural decisions, solving difficult engineering problems and setting the standard for the engineers around them.

You’re joining while the new architecture, processes and engineering team are being established, rather than coming in once everything has already been decided.