Backend Engineer (Ruby on Rails, Microservices)

WorkAxle is looking for a talented and driven Backend Software Engineer with strong expertise in Ruby and Ruby on Rails to join our innovative and fast-paced team. As we continue to expand and modernize our workforce management platform, we’re seeking someone passionate about building robust solutions - someone who thrives in a collaborative environment and is excited to both enhance existing applications and create new microservices to support our growth.

How We Work

We favor microservices over monoliths. Our stack includes a core Ruby service, multiple Nest.js services, and a standalone React frontend. This domain-driven separation accelerates development cycles and enhances team autonomy by avoiding large, tightly coupled releases.

What you’ll do

• Work on both our core Ruby on Rails monolith and new microservices (primarily Nest.js).

• Work closely with product and engineering teammates in the Scheduling or Time & Attendance teams to deliver impactful solutions.

• Design, build, maintain, and scale robust distributed systems, including migrating business logic from the monolith.

• Develop and integrate services using gRPC and RabbitMQ.

• Apply domain-oriented thinking to architect and organize codebases.

• Leverage advanced Ruby gems and patterns, including from the dry-rb stack (e.g., dry-validation, dry-monads).

• Contribute to technical discussions and help shape our evolving architecture.

• Strong experience with Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

• Strong experience with PostgreSQL and data modeling.

• Comfort working beyond standard Rails conventions and a willingness to learn/use advanced patterns and gems (e.g., dry-rb stack, alternative architectural styles like Hanami).

• Experience building robust, scalable distributed systems.

• Experience with large-scale, high-availability systems.

• Domain-driven design mindset.

• Familiarity with background job processing.

• Experience building and consuming APIs (REST, JSON:API; gRPC is a plus).

• Proficiency with testing frameworks and TDD/BDD practices (strong testing culture).

Nice-to-Have:

• Experience with Node.js, especially Nest.js.

• Familiarity with Go (Golang).

• Hands-on experience with gRPC and RabbitMQ.

• Experience with Temporal or similar workflow orchestration tools - we’re open to adopting such technologies to improve system reliability and streamline development of complex workflows.

• Experience with microservices migration projects.

• Experience with DevOps, CI/CD, and monitoring tools is a plus.

Who should apply

• You enjoy the challenge of evolving legacy systems while building modern microservices.

• You’re not dogmatic about frameworks and prioritize choosing the right tool for the job.

• You value clean, maintainable, and well-architected code following domain-driven principles.

• You want to directly improve the daily scheduling and time tracking experience for thousands of users.

Bonus points

• Experience with the dry-rb ecosystem or Hanami.

• Prior work on high-scale, event-driven architectures.

• Contributions to open-source Ruby or Node.js projects.