We’re hiring an experienced Ruby on Rails developer (remote) [Position Filled]

Hi there! We’re looking for a remote experienced full stack Ruby on Rails developer for constant long term work with at least 3+ years work experience. Ideally we’d like to start with you doing a few tasks as a freelancer and see how it goes from there.

About us

WebTranslateIt is a completely remote, bootstrapped, profitable SaaS company launched in 2009 and built with Ruby on Rails. Our software helps hundreds of software companies manage their translations in order to reach new markets. You can read more about our history here.

The team is small — in fact it’s only Estelle who does the administrative and financial part and I, Ed, working on software development (I’m also the founder and CEO). After more than 12 years working on WebTranslateIt’s code I am looking to step back from programming to give me time to steer and grow the company. The app is used by hundreds of companies all over the world.

The software is large and complex, but we designed it modular. For instance, all the language file parsing code (we support over 40 different file formats) is in a separate rubygem library. Same thing with the code to connect to the machine translation APIs, or with the code that verifies if a translation is semantically valid or not.

Our stack: Ruby on Rails, nginx, passenger enterprise edition, Postgres, delayed_job background workers and Sphinx search for full-text search. Our stack is running on 2 high performance bare metal servers (one server hosting our app and files, the other hosting our database).

Although our software has grown relatively complex over the years, I strongly believe on keeping software as simple as possible and I think that in software, boring is a feature. We’re running on a vanilla Ruby on Rails stack with a stock Postgresql database. We’re not looking for a developer who pushes us/fights us to use one of the latest technology fads which would make the software harder to maintain. Everything is a trade off. With technology advancing and processing power getting cheaper we’re looking at simplifying our software stack by removing dependencies. For instance, we’d love to be able to use Postgresql’s now built-in full text search instead of relying on Sphinx. Sphinx has been good on us, but it also adds a certain layer of complexity (indexes, re-indexes via background jobs, etc).

In clear, we’re not against using newer technologies, but we know every solution has its pros and cons, and one of the big pros for us is simplicity and maintainability. We’re looking for a developer having enough maturity and experience to be able to understand, respect and agree with that.

About you

The work will be done remotely but since we are looking for someone able to do some tech support you must be situated in an area between GMT-3 to GMT+3.

You must:

• be proficient in English,
• have 4+ years experience in Ruby on Rails,
• be willing to learn,
• know how to work with jQuery and Javascript
• be independent, self-learner and have a can-do attitude
• be courteous and respectful, especially with our customers.

Some of the tasks you will undertake:

• upgrade the Ruby on Rails framework and dependencies,
• upgrade the code to integrate some of Rails’s newest technologies,
• fix bugs with our Stripe integration,
• integrate a revamped homepage working with a designer,
• answer technical customer support, file a ticket if there is a problem and fix the bug,
• be on call every now and then (only once you’re proficient in the technical support and with financial compensation)
• build a file parser for a new file format that we need to support

EDIT November 9th of 2021: This position has now been filled.