Senior Backend Engineer

About Ruby Labs

Ruby Labs is a leading tech company creating and operating innovative consumer products across the health, education, and entertainment industries. We are driven by innovative teams shaping the future of consumer-led products and are always seeking passionate individuals to join us. Learn more about our story at: https://rubylabs.com/about-us/

About the Role

We are hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to help design, build, and scale the core backend systems powering our AI product. This is a high-ownership role for an engineer passionate about solving distributed systems challenges and driving both feature delivery and infrastructure excellence. You will collaborate closely with our development team to ensure consistency, quality, and alignment across all projects.

Key Responsibilities

• Deliver new backend features with a focus on scalability, performance, and reliability.
• Maintain, optimize, and improve existing services and infrastructure.
• Design, deploy, and operate backend services across AWS, Cloudflare, and other environments.
• Implement and evolve monitoring and observability using tools such as Sentry, OpenTelemetry (OTel), logging, and alerting.
• Investigate and resolve production issues across distributed systems.
• Write clean, maintainable code aligned with SOLID principles, system design, and backend best practices.
• Lead incident investigations, root cause analysis, and system reliability improvements.
• Contribute to architectural decisions, documentation, and infrastructure planning.
• Collaborate with high standards for communication, ownership, and delivery.

Requirements

• Deep expertise in distributed systems, system design, and backend architecture.
• Strong understanding of database fundamentals, including indexing, consistency, replication, transactions, and storage trade-offs.
• Proven ability to design scalable and resilient systems.
• Fluency in Node.js backend development.
• Strong grasp of software engineering principles, including SOLID.
• Experience debugging complex issues in production environments.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS) and backend service deployment.
• Experience implementing monitoring and observability using tools such as Sentry and OpenTelemetry (OTel), including tracing, logging, and alerting.
• High standards for code quality, reliability, and communication.
• Deep knowledge of Redis, including caching, pub/sub, queues, replication, persistence, and performance tuning.
• Strong experience with AWS services, including compute, serverless, networking, storage, security, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Experience with Cloudflare Workers, edge routing, caching, and security primitives.
• Familiarity with Sentry performance monitoring and OpenTelemetry instrumentation at scale.
• Comfortable working within ± 2 hours of UK time.

Nice to Have

• Experience working in startup environments or small, high-autonomy engineering teams.
• Passion for building and improving infrastructure, developer experience, and observability.

Location

This is a remote position. Applicants from any country are welcome, provided they are located within approximately ± 4 hours of CET (Central European Time) to ensure optimal collaboration during working hours.

What We Offer

• Remote Work Environment: Enjoy the freedom to work from anywhere, promoting a healthy work-life balance.
• Unlimited PTO: Take as much paid time off as you need to recharge and prioritize your well-being.
• Paid National Holidays: Relax and celebrate national holidays with paid time off.
• Company-provided MacBook: Receive a top-notch Apple MacBook to ensure seamless productivity.
• Flexible Independent Contractor Agreement: Benefit from flexibility, autonomy, tax advantages, networking opportunities, and reduced employment obligations.

Interview Process

Our application review process typically takes 3 to 5 days. If your profile is a potential fit, you will proceed through the following stages:

• Recruiter Screening (40 minutes)
• First Interview (30 minutes)
• Technical Interview (45 minutes)
• Final Interview (30 minutes)