Senior Back-end Engineer

About Toptal

Toptal is a global network of top freelance talent in business, design, and technology that enables companies to scale their teams, on-demand. With $100+ million in annual revenue and over 40% year-over-year growth, Toptal is the world's largest fully remote company.

We take the best elements of virtual teams and combine them with a support structure that encourages innovation, social interaction, and fun. We see no borders, move at a fast pace, and are never afraid to break the mold.

Position Description

Ruby on Rails powers a lot of our infrastructure, and we're looking for hardworking Ruby engineers to support us in reaching the next level.

As members of one of the technical teams at Toptal, we help with the introduction and adoption of new technologies, as defined by our architects. We research, implement, test, and help other teams integrate new technologies, and we maintain some microservices that are in use by the whole engineering team. Most of our work is in Ruby, but we are not limited to it; we also develop and support Elixir, Node.js, and Go-based solutions, we work with ElasticSearch and Kafka and we are into Docker, Kubernetes, and others.

Our main responsibility these days is supporting the migration of Toptal's core system from a large Ruby on Rails monolith to GraphQL SOA and React frontend.

This is a remote position that can be done from anywhere. Due to the remote nature of this role, we are unable to provide visa sponsorship. Resumes and communication must be submitted in English.

Responsibilities:

• Write elegant, efficient, and testable code, which is easy to maintain and debug.
• Cover code with tests and perform manual testing of features.
• Work on the infrastructure part of the project, collaborating with the infrastructure engineers
• Review the work of colleagues.
• As an excellent teammate, continuously improve our team's processes, brainstorm ideas, and communicate status and progress.
• Mentor team members, provide feedback, and continuously improve as a professional.

In the first week, expect to:

• Meet the mentors that will guide you during the onboarding month.
• Get to know our tech stack.
• Participate in team and cross-team meetings.

In the first month, expect to:

• Develop your first tasks and have them deployed to production.
• Learn about the technology that powers Toptal - services, patterns, and libraries we use and develop.
• Get to know one of the services in-depth, by pairing with other engineers, tackling issues, and reviewing changes.

In the first three months, expect to:

• Deliver value in regular cadence.
• Get comfortable with the daily work routine of our team.
• Get to know the main services we maintain.
• Review code written by your colleagues.
• Actively participate in software planning, development, and maintenance.
• Be ready to propose improvements to Toptal's processes and codebase.

In the first six months, expect to:

• Contribute to planning and executing multi-sprint initiatives inside your team.
• Lead technical initiatives on our team.
• Drive improvements to the codebase and processes.

In the first year, expect to:

• Have a detailed understanding of Toptal's technical stack, collaboration rituals, processes, performance, and future work.
• Determine what your career path looks like at Toptal.
• Mentor Toptal's new team members.
• Exchange 360 feedback with peers in an annual review cycle.

Requirements:

• Have 5+ years of web development experience.
• Have a strong knowledge of object-oriented programming, automated software testing, databases, development, and testing essential methodologies.
• Care about multiple quality dimensions like user impact, failure tolerance, code maintenance, implementation time, security breaches, and performance.
• Have experience developing with a web framework (Ruby on Rails).
• Have experience with GraphQL.
• Have knowledge of more than one programming language.
• Be genuinely interested in technology and love to try new things.
• Seek complex problems but also consider multiple solutions, weigh them in, and decide on the best course of action.
• Grow with providing and receiving transparent but always constructive feedback.
• Special individual contributors will thrive at Toptal. We are not here just to tell other people what to do.