Senior Software Engineer

About The Role Senior Software Engineer We’re seeking a Senior Software Engineer with strong Ruby on Rails experience to join as our third engineer and take primary ownership of our backend systems. You’ll work closely with our founder and fellow engineers to understand customer problems, ship improvements and new features, and keep the platform reliable. You’ll own projects end-to-end, from shaping requirements through testing, deployment, and follow-through in production. Location: Remote-first (U.S. only). Preference for candidates based in greater Boston first and foremost, followed by other parts of MA, NH, PA, or SC. Candidates must have authorization to work in the U.S. This startup is building the modern operating system for pet care businesses. The pet care industry is rapidly digitizing, but most businesses are still stitching together their operations across spreadsheets, messaging apps, and outdated tools. We’re changing that. What You'll Do What you’ll work on This is a hands-on role in an established product. Your work will include new features, improvements to existing code, customer support investigations, and testing and deploying your changes. Some workflows involve manual user acceptance testing and deployment steps today. You’ll make architectural improvements alongside delivering practical improvements customers need now. Example Projects Designing scheduling and routing logic that accounts for real-world constraints like routes, pet behavior, and timing requirementsImproving reliability and observability of background job systems, including handling failures, retries, and backlogs without impacting usersRefining our data model and architecture to support a growing, multi-sided network of businesses and pet parents, while laying the foundation for a marketplaceExploring intelligent features such as recommendations, scheduling optimization, and workflow automation to help businesses operate more efficiently What You’ll Do Architect, build, and maintain backend systems using Ruby on Rails within a product built with Ember, React, and React Native across multiple servicesOwn backend and infrastructure decisions, including performance, reliability, scalability, and costDeploy, monitor, and scale applications on AWS, and maintain reliable background job infrastructureStrengthen our test suite and developer workflows to increase confidence and speed of iterationCollaborate closely with product, operations, and customers to ship and iterate quicklyParticipate in shared customer support and engineering on-call rotationsLead incident response for backend and infrastructure failures, restore service and drive root-cause fixes and prevention What You’ll Bring Technical experience: 5+ years experience shipping production systems, ideally in a startup or high-ownership environmentStrong backend experience with Ruby on Rails in production and ability to design scalable architectureExperience operating production systems with attention to performance, reliability, scalability, and cost, along with a backend stewardship mindset focused on improving architecture over timeExperience working with asynchronous systems such as background job queues, including debugging failures and handling backlogs in productionExperience planning and implementing upgrades from legacy stacks, including assessing risks, managing dependencies, and rolling out changes safelyBrownie points for hands-on experience with AWS, including deployments, monitoring, scaling, and operating serverless systems in productionFamiliarity with containerization and associated tradeoffsComfortable working across the stack when needed (Ember, React, React Native are a plus)