Sr. Full-Stack Software Developer (Ruby / Rails)

Please make sure to read the application thoroughly and follow the appropriate application process, incomplete applications will not be considered.

About Microverse

We believe the place where you are born shouldn't determine your opportunities in life. We provide access to global opportunities by offering a world-class education no matter where you come from.

Microverse is an online school for software developers where students learn to work remotely with people from around the world. Students don't pay tuition until they get hired and start a global career.

We are backed by amazing global investors including Y Combinator, General Catalyst, and many world-class angel investors, such as Paul Graham, Paul Buchheit (the creator of Gmail), and Kevin Hartz (the founder of Eventbrite). We are a passionate and fast-moving team of global citizens working remotely from 12+ countries.

Being remote-first and transparent, we take pride in the amazing remote culture we are building, while also making time for in-person time with team members around the world (when it is safe to do so). We are a small but mighty team of curious, life-long learners, who love tackling challenges and helping shape the future of education.

Talent is universal, but opportunity is not. We're on a mission to change that. There has never been a more exciting time to join our growing team.

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Full-Stack Software Developer to join our team and implement new features, fix existing functionality as well as help our architecture evolve and support orders of magnitude more students. To be successful in this role you should have multiple years of experience building and maintaining web applications that use Ruby on Rails but also integrate with 3rd party services via REST APIs and allow for low-code/no-code interactions written by our Operations staff in tools like Zapier, Integromat and Airtable. Being comfortable with Heroku and Google Cloud Platform is a big plus!

At Microverse we use a mix of code, low-code and no-code stacks to provide the software component our students and staff interact with, and as we grow we expect the reliance on code (Ruby on Rails, currently) to increase. As we build out more scalable systems that go from handling thousands of students currently, to tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands in the future, we will face challenges in how maintain our nimble "solve your own problem" current approach with a more stable, less fragile implementation.

We strive for simple, antifragile solutions that iteratively grow to support our needs. Better to experiment and test our assumptions with running code than over-analyze and spend weeks arguing over specs or mockups.

With a keen interest in Open Source technologies, and a desire to involve our students in the running of the school, we foresee a future where we work in a fully transparent manner (FOSS licensed!) allowing our student body to take paid apprentice roles to help us also develop and maintain our infrastructure as well as hone their skills with real-work production systems experience. Are you up to that challenge?

Responsibilities

• Develop features and improvements to the Microverse service in a secure, well-tested, and performant way.
• Fix prioritized issues from the issue tracker. These are typically bugs listed in a GitHub issue with an attached severity and priority label.
• Consistently ship moderately sized features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members. Collaborate with the team on larger projects.
• Craft code that meets our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment. Maintain and advocate for these standards through code review.
• Help define and improve our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment. Maintain and advocate for these standards through code review.
• Solve technical problems of high scope and complexity.
• Collaborate with Product Management and other stakeholders within Engineering (UX, Frontend, Backend, etc.) to maintain a high bar for quality in a fast-paced, iterative environment.
• Advocate for improvements to product quality, security, and performance.
• Recognize impediments to our efficiency as a team ("technical debt"), propose and implement solutions.
• Represent Microverse and its values in public communication around specific projects and community contributions.
• Participate in weekday and weekend rotations to assist troubleshooting product operations, security operations, and urgent engineering issues.
• Help improve the overall experience of our service through improving the quality of the Frontend features both in your group and features that benefit other groups.
• Help identify areas of improvements in the code base, both specific to your group and outside your group (e.g. component library) and help contribute to make it better
• Learn, collaborate, and teach other Engineers. Everyone can contribute something new to the team regardless of how long they’ve been in the industry.
• Exert influence on the overall vision and long-range goals of your team. This could be technical and/or product focused.
• Experience with performance and optimization problems, particularly at large scale, and a demonstrated ability to diagnose and prevent these problems
• Provide mentorship for Junior and Intermediate Engineers in your section to help them grow in their technical responsibilities and remove blockers.

Requirements

• Significant professional experience with Ruby on Rails
• Professional experience with any other relevant technologies a plus (RDBMS/PostgreSQL, Redis, REST APIs, JavaScript, etc.)
• Professional experience with modern JavaScript web frameworks (any/many! VueJS , React, Angular, Ember, etc.)
• Experience with writing automated tests (e.g. Jest, Karma, Jasmine, Mocha, AVA, tape)
• A solid understanding in core web and browser concepts (e.g. how the browser parses and constructs a web page)
• A solid understanding of semantic HTML, CSS, and core JavaScript concepts
• Experience using Git in a professional/workplace environment. Ability to use GitHub
• Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment
• Demonstrated capacity to clearly and concisely communicate about complex technical, architectural, and/or organizational problems and propose thorough iterative solutions
• Experience with performance and optimization problems and a demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent these problems
• Comfort working in a highly agile, intensely iterative software development process
• Demonstrated ability to onboard and integrate with an organization long-term
• Positive and solution-oriented mindset
• Effective communication skills: Regularly achieve consensus with peers, and clear status updates
• An inclination towards communication, inclusion, and visibility
• Experience owning a project from concept to production, including proposal, discussion, and execution.
• Self-motivated and self-managing, with great organizational skills.
• Demonstrated ability to work closely with other parts of the organization
• Share our values, and work in accordance with those values
• Ability to thrive in a fully remote organization

You ideally...

• Have high empathy for working with individuals from different countries and cultures
• Are eager to experiment and learn
• Are based in Europe, the East Coast or a similar timezone in the Americas, or Africa (for max. timezone overlap with the rest of the team)
• Consider yourself to be a global citizen and are passionate about making opportunities more equally distributed around the world

At Microverse, we strive to work asynchronously as much as possible in order to make global remote collaboration effective and efficient. However, we have core hours where every team member is expected to be available for meetings. Core hours at Microverse are 10:30am to 12:30pm Eastern Time, USA. If you live in the West Coast of North America or in Asia/Pacific, this will probably impact your daily schedule more than other team members.

Benefits

• Opportunity to join a fast-growing, mission-driven company and make a positive impact on thousands of people around the world
• Leading remote-first working culture shaping the future of work
• Work from wherever you are the happiest
• International company retreats with our global team once every ~9 months
• Learning and development budget for books, courses, and conferences
• Hardware & office set up stipend
• Unlimited PTO and 12 weeks fully-paid parental leave
• Work alongside our fully distributed team from 15+ different countries

Our team believes in and embodies our core values:

• We are global citizens
• We are passionate about our mission
• We invest in people
• We are eager learners
• We are transparent
• We take ownership of our work
• We live a harmonious life

How to Apply

Send us a short paragraph telling us why you think you are a great fit for this position and include the word "chair" to make sure that you read the entire job description. Applications without an introduction including the word "chair" will not be moved forward in the process. This position is a full-time remote position.

Hiring Process:

Due to the high number of applications we receive, we will only be able to get back to you if we decide to move forward with your application.

If you pass the first screening, we will invite you to the second step of our hiring process where we use a tool called Hireflix to ask a few questions. We use this tool to promote asynchronous communication and to achieve a more objective initial screening - both of which are very important in our remote environment. Following steps: Interview with the hiring manager, take-home assignment, general cultural interview, then an interview with our CEO.

Microverse is an equal opportunity employer and acts in this capacity without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, or disability.

Salary Description

At Microverse, salaries are transparent and based on location and experience. The salary range for this role could be between $71,671.87 - $161,344.45. We used Kiev and New York City for the range benchmarks.

Some example salaries for locations are below:

• Warsaw: $86,773.97 - $95,750.58
• Kiev: $71,671.87 - $79,086.20
• Bucharest: $76,029.79 - $83,894.94
• Mexico City: $76,863.21 - $84,814.58
• Lagos: $88,159.66 - $97,279.63
• Sao Paulo: $72,937.07 - $80,482.28
• New York City: $146,218.41 - $161,344.45