Senior Principal Back End Engineer

Job Title: Principal Backend Engineer (Ruby on Rails)
Location: Remote (PST time zone work hours)
Type: Full-Time 

We’re looking for a seasoned Principal Backend Engineer to join our growing team. You’ll play a critical role in refactoring and enhancing our legacy applications, supporting infrastructure, and helping to shape future technical decisions. 

You’ll collaborate with a small, focused product and engineering team to build and maintain applications used by hundreds of thousands of users. If you’ve built and scaled customer-facing platforms and can dive into a codebase and quickly find and implement improvements, we’d love to meet you.

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  Refactor and maintain core backend systems powering the Homeroom platform.

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  Analyze the current codebase and implement scalable, high-performance improvements.

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  Collaborate with product and engineering teams to deliver new backend features and services.

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  Monitor and improve server performance, uptime, and overall application health.

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  Own the delivery of robust backend logic from concept through production.

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  Contribute to architectural conversations with a pragmatic, hands-on mindset.

• 7+ years of backend development experience, with deep expertise in Ruby on Rails.

• Proven experience with Heroku and PostgreSQL in a production environment.

• Track record of building and maintaining large-scale, customer-facing applications.

• Strong understanding of server-side technologies, backend performance, and application architecture.

• Experience implementing major code refactors or migrating legacy systems.

• Ability to ramp up quickly on existing codebases and suggest high-impact changes.

• Comfortable working independently and driving projects to completion.

• Fluent English communication skills required.

• Availability for full PST timezone overlap during the first month (more flexibility afterward).

• Familiarity with frontend frameworks or full-stack development is a bonus.

• Experience working in a startup or growth-stage environment.

• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and observability tools.

• Technical assessment (developed by team).

• Live technical interview with engineering team.

• Cultural fit conversation.