Senior Rails Back-End Developer
Posted on: January 18, 2026 | Remote (Flexible)
Company Name: Hubstaff | Application Deadline: Open Until Filled
Team: Engineering | Reports To: Engineering Manager
Division: Backend Engineering | Employment Type: Full-Time
Location: Argentina | Spain | Poland | Portugal | Romania | Brazil
Schedule: Flexible-Remote | Experience Level: 07+ Years
Company Overview
At Hubstaff, our mission drives everything we create: to empower people to have their most productive workday, every single day. We accomplish this ambitious goal by providing the industry-leading workforce analytics and time tracking platform specifically designed for remote and distributed teams operating across continents, timezones, and cultures.
We've been fully remote for over a decade—long before remote work became a global trend or business necessity. While other companies scrambled to adapt their operations during recent years, we'd already spent ten years perfecting the art and science of distributed collaboration. We continue to believe that remote work represents the most significant shift in the modern workplace since the advent of the personal computer revolutionized how businesses operate.
Our platform serves as the operational backbone for more than 95,000 businesses worldwide, helping them track time with precision, manage complex schedules across multiple timezones, and automate global payments with transparency and accountability at its core. From fast-growing startups to established enterprises, organizations across every industry depend on Hubstaff to manage their most valuable resource: their people's time.
We're a product-led company characterized by a winning culture, strong market momentum, and an ambitious long-term vision: to become an essential component of every remote company's technology stack—as fundamental as email, communication platforms, or project management tools. Despite our success serving tens of thousands of businesses, we're genuinely just getting started on this journey. The technical challenges ahead are substantial, the opportunities are enormous, and that's precisely where you come in.
The Role
We're actively hiring a Senior Rails Back-End Developer to join our accomplished engineering team. This represents a full-time position requiring approximately 40 hours per week, offering complete location flexibility and genuine long-term career potential with a company that values stability and sustained growth over constant churn.
Your primary focus will be architecting, scaling, and optimizing the back-end systems that power our Software-as-a-Service platform serving tens of thousands of businesses processing millions of transactions daily. From designing high-volume APIs that handle concurrent requests from users across the globe to optimizing database performance for queries running against massive datasets, and ensuring system reliability even during peak usage periods, your work will be absolutely foundational to Hubstaff's continued growth trajectory.
This isn't a role where you'll be implementing trivial features or maintaining legacy code indefinitely. You'll be solving genuinely challenging technical problems at meaningful scale: how do we efficiently process millions of time tracking records while maintaining sub-second query performance? How do we architect our systems to handle 10x growth without complete rewrites? How do we ensure data consistency across distributed services while maintaining availability?
We value stability and deep product knowledge over transactional relationships. We're specifically seeking engineers who envision themselves growing with a product and team for years to come, not those looking for their next short-term contract before moving on. If you're excited about investing deeply in a codebase, understanding its evolution over time, and watching your architectural decisions compound in value, this role offers that increasingly rare opportunity.
What You'll Do
Your daily responsibilities will encompass the full spectrum of backend engineering work at a scaled SaaS platform. You'll design, build, and maintain services and features using Ruby on Rails, our primary backend framework. This isn't just about adding endpoints or tweaking existing code—you'll be making fundamental architectural decisions that impact how our platform evolves.
You'll architect scalable systems capable of handling millions of database records and high concurrency levels without degradation in performance or user experience. This requires deep understanding of database design, caching strategies, query optimization, and distributed systems principles. You'll need to think carefully about data models that work efficiently at scale, not just for the initial implementation.
Performance optimization represents an ongoing responsibility. You'll proactively identify and resolve bottlenecks across database queries, application logic, and infrastructure configurations. This detective work requires profiling applications under load, analyzing query execution plans, understanding database indexing strategies, and making informed tradeoffs between competing optimization approaches.
Background job processing using Sidekiq and Redis will be central to your toolkit for handling asynchronous operations efficiently—whether processing large data imports, generating complex reports, sending notifications, or any operation that shouldn't block user requests. You'll need to design job workflows that are resilient to failures, idempotent where necessary, and observable for debugging.
Automated testing using RSpec ensures code quality and prevents regressions as the codebase evolves. You'll write comprehensive test coverage for your code, understanding which types of tests provide the most value and how to balance test comprehensiveness with development velocity.
Collaboration with the Engineering Manager and cross-functional teams will shape technical direction and influence architectural decisions. Your experience and judgment will inform what we build and how we build it. You'll participate actively in technical discussions, bringing your perspective to architecture reviews and design sessions.
Code reviews, documentation, and planning sessions round out your responsibilities. You'll review peers' code with an eye toward maintainability, performance, and adherence to our architectural principles. You'll document complex systems so future engineers can understand your decisions. You'll participate in planning sessions to estimate effort and identify technical dependencies.
Ensuring high reliability and scalability of core services represents your ultimate accountability. Users depend on Hubstaff being available when they need it, performing well under load, and accurately processing their critical business data.
What You Should Have
We're seeking candidates with substantial professional development experience—specifically 7+ years of professional development work, including at least 5+ years building and maintaining production Ruby on Rails applications at scale. This depth of experience ensures you've encountered and solved the complex challenges that arise in mature, high-traffic applications serving real business customers.
Strong database expertise with PostgreSQL or MySQL is absolutely essential. You should be deeply comfortable with schema design decisions, understanding normalization tradeoffs, crafting efficient queries, optimizing slow queries through proper indexing, and understanding database performance characteristics under various load patterns. You've worked with databases containing millions or billions of records and understand how behavior changes at scale.
Experience with background job frameworks and asynchronous processing is required. You've implemented systems that handle time-intensive operations—data processing, report generation, external API integrations—without blocking user interactions or degrading application responsiveness.
Proven experience designing systems for performance and scale is critical. Your portfolio should demonstrate that you've built applications that grew successfully over time, handling increasing data volumes and user concurrency without complete architectural rewrites. You understand horizontal and vertical scaling approaches and when each makes sense.
Solid understanding of modern architectural patterns including Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), event sourcing, CQRS, and microservices principles will inform your design decisions. You don't just implement features—you think architecturally about how components should interact and evolve.
Working knowledge of JavaScript is a nice-to-have but explicitly not required for this backend-focused role. We have dedicated frontend engineers, though understanding how frontend applications consume your APIs can inform better API design.
Experience working asynchronously in fully remote teams is crucial. You should be self-directed, comfortable with written communication as the primary collaboration mechanism, and able to work effectively across timezones without constant synchronous meetings or hand-holding.
Finally, we're looking for candidates with a history of multi-year tenure in recent roles. Frequent job changes raise concerns about cultural fit and long-term commitment to product excellence.
Nice to Have
While not required, several qualifications would make you an even stronger candidate and accelerate your impact on our team.
Experience with message queues like Kafka or RabbitMQ, or search engines such as Elasticsearch or Solr demonstrates exposure to sophisticated distributed systems architectures beyond monolithic Rails applications. These technologies solve specific problems at scale and experience with them suggests you've worked in complex technical environments.
Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms like AWS or Google Cloud Platform indicates you understand modern deployment, orchestration, and infrastructure patterns. While we have dedicated DevOps support, backend engineers who understand infrastructure make better architectural decisions.
Performance tuning experience in high-traffic applications handling millions of requests daily shows you've operated at significant scale and understand the unique challenges that arise when applications grow beyond typical traffic levels.
Location
We're currently hiring candidates based in Argentina, Brazil, Poland, Romania, Spain, and Portugal. These locations provide optimal timezone overlap with our distributed engineering team while maintaining cost structures that allow us to offer competitive compensation for top global talent.
Compensation & Contract Type
This position operates as an independent contractor arrangement, which we prefer for its flexibility and administrative simplicity across international borders. Compensation ranges from $45 to $50 USD per hour, translating to approximately $7,200 to $8,000 USD monthly for full-time commitment of roughly 40 hours per week.
Your specific rate within this range will reflect your experience level, specialized expertise (such as performance optimization or distributed systems), and the value you bring to our team based on your track record of delivering results.
Why You'll Love Working with Us
Our remote-first culture is fundamentally built on trust, autonomy, and asynchronous collaboration. We don't micromanage or require constant availability during specific hours. We judge contributions by results and impact, not hours logged or responsiveness in Slack. You'll have the freedom to structure your workday in ways that maximize your productivity and accommodate your life.
You'll work on technically challenging problems at meaningful scale that require sophisticated engineering. These aren't trivial CRUD applications—they're complex, distributed systems serving real businesses with demanding requirements around performance, reliability, and data accuracy.
Our long-term product focus means you can build something you'll genuinely invest in over years, watching your architectural decisions mature and evolve rather than jumping to completely different products every few months. You'll see the long-term consequences of design decisions and learn from both successes and mistakes.
We offer competitive compensation that recognizes and rewards top engineering talent in the global marketplace. Our rates reflect that we're hiring senior engineers capable of working independently and making sound technical decisions.
Inclusion at Hubstaff
Hubstaff is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity in all its forms and remain firmly committed to creating an inclusive environment for all team members, regardless of background, identity, or lived experience. Our distributed nature means we inherently value diverse perspectives from different cultures, geographies, and experiences. We actively work to ensure everyone feels welcomed, valued, and empowered to do their best work.
Apply for This Position
Ready to join a team building the operational infrastructure for the future of remote work? We're excited to review your application and learn about the challenging technical problems you've solved.
