Aha - Ruby on Rails Engineer

Most of our features involve writing significant Ruby on Rails code, so you should have experience working in a Rails codebase. We also write a lot of React but we are happy to help you learn that part on the job.

We believe that being a kind person who elevates the rest of the team is just as valuable as writing great code. You have strong problem-solving skills and experience working on important functionality for a cloud-based product. You are humble, eager to learn, and always willing to help others. You want teammates who enjoy solving problems regardless of the technologies and techniques involved. You have worked at meaningful scale before and want to do so again. You also have the below experience and skills:

• Experience producing scalable, efficient, and maintainable code
• Experience building features (ideally at a high-growth SaaS company)
• Active collaborator with product teams

Aha! helps companies build lovable software. We provide the world's #1 product development tools — Aha! Roadmaps, Aha! Ideas, Aha! Notebooks, and Aha! Develop — which are used by more than 700,000 builders. Product teams rely on our expertise, guided templates, and training programs via Aha! Academy to be their best. We are proud to be a very different type of high-growth SaaS company. The business is self-funded, profitable, and 100 percent remote. We are recognized as one of the best fully remote companies to work for, champion the Bootstrap Movement, and have given over $1M to people in need through Aha! Cares. Learn more at www.aha.io.

Our team

Aha! engineering is a mid-sized, fully remote team that is highly productive. We are centered around North American time zones so we can collaborate during the workday.

• We help each other grow: We each bring unique skills to the table and want our teammates to feel valued from the start. Our onboarding program exposes new hires to the codebase and lets them contribute right away.
• We move quickly: We ship code multiple times a day. We believe in getting valuable features in front of customers and iteratively improving as we learn what works and what does not.
• We value product over process: We want the team to have the time and focus on solving complex challenges. We minimize the overhead by setting clear goals and avoiding heavyweight processes and excessive meetings.
• We share knowledge freely: We share our learnings with each other and with the developer community. Our engineering blog demonstrates how we tackle interesting challenges at Aha!
• We enjoy: We like what we do. And we want you to love your team and your job too. Learn more about The Responsive Method, our company values, and the generous benefits we offer.

Our technology

Our web application is a single-instance, multi-tenant Ruby on Rails monolith supported by Postgres (database), Redis (background jobs), and memcached (Rails caching). We also run a Node.js webserver to support collaborative editing and real-time updates. Our application is hosted on Amazon Web Services and architected with ECS for reproducibility and scalability.

We utilize a growing amount of React on the front end to build rich client-side experiences, including our fully collaborative text editor and our slide presentation editor. We balance the strengths of both technologies — Rails for its conventions and simplicity and React for more powerful interactive functionality.

We embrace new technologies that help us deliver a lovable product, but we also remain cognizant of the maintenance overhead that a new library or platform brings. We solve the problems in front of us rather than prematurely optimizing to address issues that may never materialize.

We do most of our planning and collaboration in Aha! Roadmaps and built Aha! Develop so that software engineers and their teams could take advantage of those same rich features. We use Slack and Zoom for video calls. (Email? Rarely.)

We work on a broad range of features across the full stack. As a Ruby on Rails Engineer, your work will include:

• Implementing new features for our users, touching each layer of the MVC as needed
• Building deeply interactive reporting interfaces using React
• Working proactively with product and UX to refine and iterate on specifications as the feature takes shape
• Investigating slow performance and optimizing queries to ensure Aha! is snappy and satisfying to use
• Interfacing directly with users to quickly squash bugs as part of our regular customer support rotation
• Documenting components in our style guide to help drive consistency

If this role sounds appealing, we would love to hear from you. (A real human reviews every application.)