Lead Ruby Engineer

Lead Full-Stack Ruby / React Engineer

Location: Remote UK or Belfast Hybrid

Salary: Competitive + Benefits

We’re working with a fast-growing technology organisation building modern, large-scale web platforms used by customers globally. This is an opportunity to join a highly collaborative engineering team working across distributed systems, modern APIs, scalable backend services and complex web applications.

This role is ideal for a senior engineer who enjoys solving difficult technical problems, working across backend-heavy architectures and contributing to product direction in a fast-moving environment.

Important clarification:

This is a Lead Individual Contributor role. It is not a people-management or formal Tech Lead position. The successful candidate will remain hands-on and deeply technical while contributing at a senior level across architecture, systems design and engineering best practices.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale backend services within complex distributed systems

• Develop modern web applications using React and Ruby on Rails

• Design and maintain GraphQL and REST API integrations across services

• Work with PostgreSQL databases and optimise Rails applications at scale

• Contribute to resilient, event-driven architectures using Kafka and Redis

• Improve API performance, reliability and system scalability

• Collaborate closely with Product, Design and Engineering teams across web and mobile • Participate in code reviews, GitHub workflows and engineering best practices

• Work within AI-assisted development environments and modern engineering workflows

• Contribute to architectural discussions and technical decision-making across the platform

What We’re Looking For

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience

• Strong backend engineering experience within large-scale or complex environments

• Extensive experience with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL

• Strong frontend development experience with React

• Strong experience building GraphQL APIs including Apollo and schema design

• Experience working with REST APIs and service-to-service integrations

• Experience with Kafka, Redis and distributed systems architecture

• Strong understanding of scalable, resilient platform design

• Experience optimising APIs and modern web application performance

• Strong Git workflows and GitHub pull request review experience

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills

• Ability to work autonomously and manage complex technical workstreams

Nice to Have

• Experience with CircleCI or similar CI/CD tooling

• Experience with Datadog or similar observability platforms

• Experience with Bugsnag or similar error monitoring tools

• Experience working with feature flags or gated feature deployments

• Exposure to AI-assisted engineering workflows and multi-agent tooling

What’s on Offer

• Fully remote or hybrid flexibility

• Opportunity to work on modern, large-scale engineering challenges

• Strong engineering culture with highly collaborative teams

• High-impact role within a growing technology organisation

• Long-term progression and technical ownership opportunities