Sr. Ruby on Rails Engineer (Knowledge)

Engineering
New Zealand, North America, South America
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Engineering at Aha!

Aha! is the world's #1 product development software. We help over 1 million product builders bring their strategy to life. Our suite of tools includes Aha! Roadmaps, Aha! Ideas, Aha! Whiteboards, Aha! Knowledge, and Aha! Develop. 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% 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.

The Knowledge team is building new ways for product managers to develop early stage concepts, collaborate, and gain business alignment. The Aha! Knowledge product includes notes and whiteboards that users across organizations can work together on and share with outside stakeholders. Aha! Knowledge documents can integrate tightly with Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Ideas, helping product teams approach prioritization and roadmapping in both unstructured and structured ways.

  • We develop new collaborative experiences: We work with the product and UX teams to develop novel and intuitive interfaces. These allow users to collaborate in a streamlined way.

  • 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 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.)

Your experience

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:

  • Four+ years of experience working in Ruby on Rails

  • Builder of scalable, efficient, and maintainable architectures

  • Experience developing features at a high-growth SaaS company

  • Active collaborator with product teams

Your work at Aha!

The Knowledge team works on our collaborative whiteboards and note editors, adds functionality to integrate these tools with other features in the Aha! product suite, and allows for collaboration and sharing across organizations and external users.

We work on a broad range of features across the full stack. As a Sr. Ruby on Rails Engineer for Knowledge, 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 sounds appealing, we would love to hear from you. (We are always hiring for this position and a real human reviews every application.)

Grow with us

Everyone deserves to reach their fullest potential. We know that when we do work that matters with people we care about in a high-growth environment, we feel engaged and alive. It is why we joined Aha! and how we achieve our very best.

We offer all the benefits you would expect and more, including profit sharing. The specific benefits listed below are reflective of what we offer U.S.-based hires. We also do our best to extend identical benefits to international teammates.

  • The base salary range for this role in the U.S. is between $110,000 and $190,000

  • Cash-based compensation also includes profit sharing, and we contribute a percentage of your total pay each month toward your retirement

  • Medical, dental, and vision plans (for many teammates, we cover 100% of the premiums)

  • Up to 200 hours of paid time off a year to spend however you want

  • 30 to 90 days of paid parental leave and five to 10 days of paid care and bereavement leave

  • Up to $1,000 annually for third-party education, along with paid time off to immerse yourself in learning

  • Volunteer opportunities throughout the year

Base salary and total compensation are dependent upon many factors, including skills, experience, and relevant past roles.

We are building a distributed team, and you can work from anywhere in New Zealand, North America, or South America for this role. We offer generous salary, equity, benefits, and a profit-sharing program. See other openings at Aha!

Diversity

We are committed to hiring, promoting, and compensating employees based on their qualifications and demonstrated ability to perform job responsibilities. As an equal opportunity employer, Aha! welcomes all employees and applicants, without regard to age, race, color, national origin, physical or mental disability, gender, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or veteran status, condition of pregnancy, or any other legally protected characteristic. Learn more about diversity and inclusion at Aha!

Find out what makes us different. It's Lovability.

Read the bestselling book by Aha! co-founder and CEO Brian de Haaff.