Staff Engineer Team Lead (Ruby on Rails)

Were hiring a Staff Engineer / Team Lead (Ruby on Rails)!

Summary

• Flexible Title: Can tailor to reflect your skills & experience.
• Flexible Time: Can do full-time part-time side-gig (off-hours) or fractional (contract).
• Flexible Commitment: Can do short-term long-term or intermittent.

Why so flexible Were a FUNDED startup racing to launch end of Q2 2026. That gives us just 3 months to stack features while raising additional working capital. Feel free to jump in help us ship then bounce >> or stick around. A successful launch translates into lots of permanent jobs for those that want them. Were also interested in long term side gig relationships if thats what youre into - in our experience a few expert hours often beat full-time learning-curve hours.

About Us

Were a credible funded remote-first startup led by a serial technical founder and backed by a 20-person team. The product is live in private alpha.

Learn more about our founder team and comp structures at .

About The Role

This is a high-velocity individual contributor role with product ownership not a people-management position. You set the bar for how fast great Rails code ships and you do it by being the person whos best at directing AI to multiply output.

We believe working with AI is a lot like working with a brilliant but inexperienced junior developer: it can produce enormous volume but only if you know how to define the work decompose it into right-sized pieces and review output with a critical eye. If youve ever been the senior who made a team of juniors wildly productive not by doing their work but by giving them crystal-clear specs and fast feedback this role is built for you.

This is also a product-forward role. Were not hiring a separate product manager for this team. Youll work directly with stakeholders to figure out what needs to be built not just how to build it. You should genuinely enjoy that part talking to users unpacking requirements making scope calls and translating business problems into shippable slices.

Compensation

Up to $375000 max total compensation in Tier 1 cities; cash and equity components to be negotiated (amount reflects combined cash and equity components).

What Success Looks Like in 30 Days

• Youre shipping production Rails features at a pace that makes the rest of the team recalibrate what fast means
• Youve established a personal workflow for AI-assisted development that demonstrably multiplies your output and youre sharing what works
• Youve taken ownership of at least one product area: you know the stakeholders you understand what they need and youre making scope and prioritization calls confidently
• Youre decomposing work into well-specified right-sized tickets that AI (and other developers) can execute against cleanly
• The code youre shipping and reviewing is clean well-tested and production-ready velocity without quality doesnt count

What Youll Do

• Ship Rails features fast own the full cycle from stakeholder conversation to production deployment using AI tooling to maximize throughput
• Define and decompose work break ambiguous business problems into well-specified right-sized tickets that serve as both alignment artifacts and AI prompts
• Own product for your area work directly with stakeholders to understand what needs to be built make scope and prioritization decisions and ensure what ships actually solves the problem
• Set the velocity standard demonstrate whats possible when a senior engineer combines deep Rails expertise with disciplined AI-assisted workflows
• Review and elevate review PRs validate AI-generated output and raise the quality bar across the codebase
• Collaborate on architecture contribute to technical decisions on Rails PostgreSQL Redis Sidekiq and related infrastructure
• Document what works capture patterns workflows and decomposition strategies that help the whole team move faster

What Were Looking For

• Deep Ruby on Rails expertise youve built and shipped production Rails applications and you know the framework inside and out (PostgreSQL Redis Sidekiq Active Job etc.)
• Proven AI-assisted development chops youre already using AI tooling (Cursor Copilot or similar) to ship meaningfully faster and you have opinions about what works and what doesnt
• The senior who makes juniors productive skillset you know how to specify work clearly enough that someone (or something) less experienced can execute it well. You give great direction catch issues early in review and dont waste cycles on rework
• Product instincts you genuinely enjoy talking to stakeholders understanding user problems and making calls about what to build and what to cut. Youve done this before whether or not your title said product
• Velocity as a value you care about shipping. You find ways to move fast without cutting corners. Youre allergic to unnecessary process and drawn to approaches that compress cycle time
• Strong decomposition skills you can take a large ambiguous objective and break it into concrete well-scoped pieces of work. You think in dependency trees not to-do lists
• Comfort with startup ambiguity you thrive when things arent fully figured out and youre energized (not paralyzed) by the need to make decisions with incomplete information

Nice to Have

• Experience in a staff engineer tech lead or principal engineer role at a startup or high-growth company
• Familiarity with spec-driven workflows
• Experience working without a dedicated product manager youve been the person who figured out what to build
• Background in marketplace SaaS or consumer-facing Rails applications
• Experience building or contributing to AI-augmented development workflows at an organizational level