Senior Software Engineer

Stealth Startup; Massachusetts; Remote; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Stealth Startup is seeking a Senior Software Engineer with strong Ruby on Rails experience to lead backend systems as the third engineer. You’ll own projects end-to-end from design to production, collaborating with the founder and other engineers to ship improvements and new features while ensuring platform reliability.

This hands-on role focuses on building scalable backend services on AWS, improving observability, and guiding architectural decisions as the product grows.

Qualifications

• 5+ years shipping production systems in a startup or high-ownership environment.
• Deep backend experience with Ruby on Rails in production and scalable architecture design.
• Experience operating production systems with focus on performance, reliability, and cost.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and maintain backend systems using Ruby on Rails across services.
• Own backend decisions for performance, reliability, and scalability.
• Deploy, monitor, and scale applications on AWS with reliable background job infra.
• Lead incident response and drive root-cause fixes.
• Collaborate with product, operations, and customers to ship rapidly.
• Participate in on-call rotations.

Skills

Ruby on Rails

Backend architecture

AWS

Asynchronous systems

DevOps / deployment

Observability

Tools

Ember

React

React Native

Job description

We're seeking a Senior Software Engineer with strong Ruby on Rails experience to join as our third engineer and take primary ownership of our backend systems. You'll work closely with our founder and fellow engineers to understand customer problems, ship improvements and new features, and keep the platform reliable. You'll own projects end-to-end, from shaping requirements through testing, deployment, and follow-through in production.

Location: Remote-first (U.S. only). Preference for candidates based in greater Boston first and foremost, followed by other parts of MA, NH, PA, or SC. Candidates must have authorization to work in the U.S.

About the Company:

We are building the modern operating system for pet care businesses. The pet care industry is rapidly digitizing, but most businesses are still stitching together their operations across spreadsheets, messaging apps, and outdated tools. We're changing that.

What you'll work on:

This is a hands-on role in an established product. Your work will include new features, improvements to existing code, customer support investigations, and testing and deploying your changes. Some workflows involve manual user acceptance testing and deployment steps today. You'll make architectural improvements alongside delivering practical improvements customers need now.

• Designing scheduling and routing logic that accounts for real-world constraints like routes, pet behavior, and timing requirements
• Improving reliability and observability of background job systems, including handling failures, retries, and backlogs without impacting users
• Refining our data model and architecture to support a growing, multi-sided network of businesses and pet parents, while laying the foundation for a marketplace
• Exploring intelligent features such as recommendations, scheduling optimization, and workflow automation to help businesses operate more efficiently

What you'll do:

• Architect, build, and maintain backend systems using Ruby on Rails within a product built with Ember, React, and React Native across multiple services
• Own backend and infrastructure decisions, including performance, reliability, scalability, and cost
• Deploy, monitor, and scale applications on AWS, and maintain reliable background job infrastructure
• Strengthen our test suite and developer workflows to increase confidence and speed of iteration
• Collaborate closely with product, operations, and customers to ship and iterate quickly
• Participate in shared customer support and engineering on-call rotations
• Lead incident response for backend and infrastructure failures, restore service and drive root-cause fixes and prevention

What you'll bring

Technical experience:

• 5+ years experience shipping production systems, ideally in a startup or high-ownership environment
• Strong backend experience with Ruby on Rails in production and ability to design scalable architecture
• Experience operating production systems with attention to performance, reliability, scalability, and cost, along with a backend stewardship mindset focused on improving architecture over time
• Experience working with asynchronous systems such as background job queues, including debugging failures and handling backlogs in production
• Experience planning and implementing upgrades from legacy stacks, including assessing risks, managing dependencies, and rolling out changes safely
• Brownie points for hands-on experience with AWS, including deployments, monitoring, scaling, and operating serverless systems in production
• Familiarity with containerization and associated tradeoffs
• Comfortable working across the stack when needed (Ember, React, React Native are a plus)