Backend Engineer - Ruby

Vigil365 Limited; Lisboa; Hybrid; EUR 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fully remote

Job summary

Vigil365 Limited is seeking a Ruby engineer to join our cross-functional squad responsible for high-scale, customer-facing services. You will contribute to new features, evolve architecture, and ensure operational reliability in a cloud-based environment.

The role values collaboration, autonomy, experimentation, and shared ownership, shaping technical decisions and delivering impactful solutions at scale across Portugal/Brazil remote locations.

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on experience with Ruby for production applications.
• Experience building scalable, API-driven backend services.
• Familiarity with relational and NoSQL data stores (PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB).
• Proficient in automated testing using RSpec or Minitest.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver new product features in collaboration with product, design, and engineering teams.
• Contribute to system architecture discussions and evolution of technical design.
• Write high-quality Ruby code with strong test coverage.
• Support operations for services at scale, including observability and deployments.

Skills

Ruby

API design

PostgreSQL

Redis

MongoDB

RSpec / Minitest

Git

Concurrency / distributed systems

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

• Portugal / Brazil - Remote (within locations)

You will join a cross-functional squad responsible for building and maintaining high-scale, customer-facing services. The role involves contributing to new product features, evolving system architecture, improving code quality, and ensuring operational reliability in a modern, cloud-based environment.

The ideal engineer thrives in a collaborative, autonomous culture that values experimentation, continuous learning, and shared ownership. This position plays a key part in shaping technical decisions, supporting platform evolution, and delivering impactful solutions at scale.

WHAT WILL YOU BE DOING:

You will be joining our engineering team and will be a valued member working closely in a collaborative, autonomous, cross-functional team. You will help with the following:

Feature Delivery & Collaboration

• Participation in the design and delivery of new product features in collaboration with product, design, and engineering teams.
• Exploration of feasibility options and contribution to customer-focused engineering decisions.
• Commitment to clear goals, delivery expectations, and shared team objectives.
• Clear and responsible communication within the squad to support alignment and transparency.
• Communicating your needs clearly and responsibly.

Architecture & Technical Decision-Making

• Contribution to system architecture discussions and evolution of technical design within the squad.
• Application of OOP, SOLID principles, and clean coding practices to build maintainable Ruby services.
• Participation in establishing engineering patterns, standards, and long-term architectural improvements.
• Support in building highly available, resilient, and scalable systems.

Code Quality & Testing

• Development of high-quality Ruby code that is maintainable, readable, and structured for long-term sustainability.
• Adoption of strong testing practices using RSpec or Minitest to ensure robust test coverage.
• Improvement of existing systems to enhance reliability, modularity, and testability.
• Contribution to a culture of automated testing and continuous quality improvements.

Operational Excellence

• Support in building and maintaining services operating under significant scale and traffic.
• Participation in monitoring, troubleshooting, and enhancing system resilience.
• Contribution to observability practices, operational readiness, and continuous improvement of production systems.
• Engagement in deployments and incident support as part of the team’s shared operational ownership.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR:

Core Technical Skills

• Strong hands-on experience with Ruby for building production applications.
• Ability to deliver maintainable, well-structured code aligned with OOP and SOLID principles.
• Proficiency in automated testing using RSpec or Minitest.
• Experience working with Git and collaborative development workflows.
• Experience building scalable, API-driven backend services.
• Understanding of concurrency, asynchronous processing, and distributed system interactions.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, and MongoDB for data persistence and caching.
• Ability to design and troubleshoot systems operating under heavy load and high availability requirements.

Operational & Performance Awareness

• Familiarity with diagnosing performance bottlenecks and implementing optimisations.
• Strong understanding of observability principles, including monitoring, logging, and system health analysis.
• Experience supporting and iterating on production systems.
• Strong English communication skills, both written and verbal.
• Ability to contribute positively to team collaboration, solution discussions, and knowledge sharing.

AWESOME BUT NOT REQUIRED:

• Experience with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with Rack, Sinatra, or Rails frameworks.
• Exposure to EventMachine or event-driven architectures.
• Experience with ELK, Datadog, or similar observability stacks.
• Knowledge of AWS services such as ECR, EC2, S3, and RDS.
• Exposure to CI/CD pipelines, cloud-native practices, or infrastructure tooling.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU?

• Be part of our collegial environment where responsibility and authority are shared equally amongst colleagues, and help create our company culture
• A culture in which we don’t criticise failure but ensure we learn from our mistakes
• An Agile environment where your ideas are welcome
• The possibility to grow and experience different projects
• Fully remote
• The possibility of travelling