Software Engineer III (Ruby on Rails)
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
We are seeking a Software Engineer III with strong Ruby on Rails expertise to join our Social Experience team. In this role, you will own feature development within Rails-based backend services that power PrizePicks' core platform - including feeds, and profiles. You will own the delivery of complex work end-to-end, begin guiding junior engineers, and contribute to architectural decisions that shape your team's systems. This is a role for someone who can break down hard problems, deliver high-quality solutions, and start having influence beyond their own code. What You'll Do
- Own feature development: Take ownership of features end-to-end - from technical design through delivery - breaking complex projects into well-scoped, deliverable pieces.
- Write high-quality code: Produce Ruby code that is idiomatic, performant, well-tested, and raises the bar for the codebase.
- Contribute to architecture: Participate in team-level architectural decisions around data modeling, service boundaries, API design, and background processing patterns.
- Improve quality proactively: Identify opportunities to improve code quality, performance, reliability, and developer experience - and act on them.
- Guide junior engineers: Provide technical guidance to Software Engineers I and II through thorough code reviews, pairing sessions, and design feedback.
- Collaborate cross-functionally: Work with Product, Design, and QA to validate technical decisions and ensure alignment between product goals and implementation.
- Participate in on-call rotation: Take increasing ownership of incident response, contributing to root cause analysis and systemic improvements.
- Build team knowledge: Document technical decisions, data models, and service patterns to strengthen your team's shared understanding.
Requirements
- 3-5 years of professional software engineering experience, with meaningful time building Ruby on Rails applications
- History of delivering complex features within a software team to drive business outcomes
- Experience breaking down ambiguous requirements into concrete technical plans
- Exposure to large-scale, high-throughput distributed systems - you understand the challenges of building software that serves millions of users in real time
Technical Skills:
- Advanced proficiency in Ruby on Rails - you understand the framework deeply and write clean, idiomatic, production-quality code
- Strong PostgreSQL skills - schema design, query optimization, migrations, and understanding of performance characteristics at scale
- Experience designing and building RESTful APIs within Rails
- Solid testing practices - RSpec or Minitest, unit, integration, and end-to-end testing strategies
- Familiarity with background job processing (Sidekiq or similar)
- Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes)
- Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows
Working Style:
- Autonomous - you can take an ambiguous problem and drive it to a well-defined solution
- Comfortable providing and receiving direct technical feedback
- Strong written communicator, especially important in a fully remote environment
- Able to balance deep technical work with collaborative design and planning
What Makes You Stand Out
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools for coding, planning, and scoping work
- Experience with agentic coding tools and AI-augmented development workflows
- Prior experience working in a remote engineering organization
- Experience contributing to social or relationship-driven systems (feeds, follows, reactions, activity streams)
- Experience implementing stat-driven profile features (aggregations, counters, derived metrics) in production systems
- Working knowledge of graph-shaped data modeling concepts (user relationships, fan-out patterns, denormalization tradeoffs)
- Experience supporting experimentation in social surfaces (feature flags, A/B tests, ranking iterations), You must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.
Benefits & conditions
The typical salary range for this position is $170,000 to $185,000 At PrizePicks, we consider your role, level, and where you'll be working when determining our salary ranges. The compensation info you see on our job postings gives you an idea of the starting pay range for the position. Your actual pay within that range will depend on your specific work location, as well as your skills, experience, and education. Your recruiter will be happy to chat more about the specific pay range for your location and how we arrived at it during the hiring process., In addition to your great compensation package, full-time employees will be eligible for the following perks:
- Company-subsidized medical, dental, & vision plans
- 401(k) plan with company match
- Annual bonus
- Flexible PTO to encourage a healthy work/life balance (2 weeks STRONGLY encouraged!)
- Generous paid leave programs, including 16-week paid parental leave and disability benefits
- Workplace flexibility and modern work schedules focused on getting the job done, not hours clocked
- Company-wide in-person events and team outings
- Lifestyle enhancement program
- Company equipment provided (Windows & Mac options)
- Annual performance reviews with opportunities for growth and career development
