Lead Software Engineer - Ruby on Rails

You're a seasoned full-stack engineer who has spent years shipping production systems and owning real outcomes. You're comfortable working across the stack from database design to frontend UX, and you collaborate closely with product to turn ideas into reliable, scalable features., Design, build, and own the systems that power the Cureus academic publishing platform. You'll work closely with product, editorial, and design teams to shape features from idea to production, while ensuring performance, reliability, and long-term maintainability.

You will:

• Own features end-to-end, from early product discussions through implementation, deployment, and iteration.
• Work closely with product managers and stakeholders to design solutions and make technical decisions.
• Build and scale backend systems using Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL.
• Own the full frontend stack, React, HAML, and SCSS, working closely with designers to implement Figma mocks with precision.
• Write high-quality, well-tested code, including unit and integration tests, and contribute to strong code review practices.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across the stack (SQL, backend, frontend).
• Build LLM-powered features that ship to real users, agentic editorial workflows, intelligent search, content analysis, summarization. Help define what "production-grade AI" looks like at Cureus.
• Use AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor) to accelerate development, debugging, and refactoring.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, pairing, and technical guidance.
• Lead larger projects by anticipating architectural needs and making sound tradeoffs.
• Maintain and improve system reliability, debugging and resolving production issues as needed.
• Work with AWS infrastructure (Elastic Beanstalk, RDS, S3, etc.) to deploy and operate systems at scale., * Ownership: you take responsibility for what you build and how it performs in production.
• Product thinking: you understand the "why," not just the implementation.
• Mentorship: you help others grow and make the team better.
• Curiosity: you explore new technologies (including AI) and apply them where they matter.

Do you have experience in Tooling?, You have:

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience (or equivalent experience building and operating production systems at scale), with strong hands-on experience in Ruby on Rails.
• Proven experience shipping and owning production systems end-to-end.
• Experience building production applications with React.
• Strong SQL skills and deep familiarity with PostgreSQL and Active Record.
• Experience working with AWS in a production environment.
• Hands on experience shipping at least one LLM-powered feature to production. You understand the basics of prompting, tool use, evals, and why AI features fail in ways that normal features don't.
• Experience writing tests in RSpec and maintaining code quality in a collaborative environment.
• Familiarity with modern AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, Copilot) and incorporating them effectively into your workflow.
• Comfortable working from high-level product direction and turning it into concrete technical solutions.
• Ability to move quickly and iterate without sacrificing code quality or long-term maintainability.
• Ability to work cross-functionally and communicate clearly with product and non-engineering stakeholders.
• Strong understanding of system design, tradeoffs, and scalable architecture.
• Mentorship experience, you raise the quality of the team around you.

Nice to have

• Experience with search technologies (Elasticsearch / OpenSearch).
• Experience with background job systems (e.g., Sidekiq).
• Experience with observability, logging, and performance monitoring.

Our environment

• Small, senior team with high ownership and minimal bureaucracy.
• Engineers are expected to contribute to product decisions, not just implementation.
• Fast iteration cycles with a focus on shipping and learning from production., * Ruby on Rails: 3 years (Required)

Pulled from the full job description

• Parental leave
• 401(k)
• Health insurance
• Vision insurance
• Dental insurance, * 401(k)
• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Parental leave
• Vision insurance