Senior Rails Engineer: Remote, Modernization & Payments

Student First Technologies; United States; Remote; USD 190,000 - 235,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance (HSA/FSA options)

Dental & vision insurance

Life insurance

Short-term disability (fully paid)

Hospital & critical illness coverage

Job summary

Student First Technologies seeks a senior technical leader to set the direction for Theodore, its Rails monolith. You will guide architecture, ensure auditability of payments and ledgers, and modernize the platform while shipping real features for education programs nationwide.

On a small team, you’ll still write substantial code and mentor engineers, define standards for testing, security, and observability, and collaborate with product leadership to translate policy changes into scalable

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and operating production web applications (Rails).
• Lead major technical changes in a large, long-lived codebase without disrupting customers.
• Expert PostgreSQL knowledge: schema design, performance, migrations.
• Experience designing systems where payments, ledgers, or regulated data matter.
• Strong security judgement: PII, encryption at rest, access control, secrets management.
• Experience working on a remote team.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design of large, cross-cutting changes, and write the proposals and decision records that align the team.
• Own the integrity and auditability of financial systems: ledgers, holds, card authorizations, ACH settlement and reconciliation with banking partners.
• Define and drive modernization of a Rails monolith through projects and feature work.
• Set engineering standards for testing, code review, linting, security, observability and release documentation; build easy-to-follow tooling.
• Shape how the team uses AI coding tools to balance speed with ownership of code.
• Partner with product leadership to translate new state programs into technical plans.
• Mentor engineers through pairing, design review and code review.
• Serve as escalation point for the hardest production problems and drive follow-up.

Skills

Rails expertise

Production web apps

Remote team experience

Security and data protection

Communication skills

Payments/ledgers domain

Code review and testing

Tools

PostgreSQL

Heroku

AWS

GitHub Actions

Job description

Student First Technologies seeks a senior technical leader to set the direction for Theodore, its Rails monolith. You will guide architecture, ensure auditability of payments and ledgers, and modernize the platform while shipping real features for education programs nationwide.

On a small team, you’ll still write substantial code and mentor engineers, define standards for testing, security, and observability, and collaborate with product leadership to translate policy changes into scalable