Lead developer (Ruby)

A little about us

We’re on a mission to unlock global talent by making cross border hiring easy. We want to spread great employment rights and benefits and help make them the norm for remote workers across the world.

🗺 Remote working, flexible hours.

⏱ Permanent, full time

💵 Competitive salary

🍰 Early stage equity

Hiring people internationally is complicated – with interacting engineering, legal, financial, operations, and HR processes. We’d like to find people who think this is as interesting a challenge as we do.

The role 👩‍💻

Location: Anywhere within timezone GMT +/- 4h.

We’re an inclusive and diverse workplace, and welcome applicants from marginalized groups – the world over.

What you’ll be working on

You’ll be tech lead on one of our product teams, working on:

• Hiring automation. Hiring a team member cross-border should be quick and frictionless, but there are too many barriers to that today.
• HR tools. Companies are more and more building global, distributed teams, and they’ll need the tools to enable them to work effectively.
• Integrations. We are integrating payments providers so that employees and contractors all over the world can be paid quickly and conveniently.
• The employee experience. We exist to help remote workers find great jobs.

Delivering projects to empower companies and remote workers

As a lead developer you will own the technical delivery of significant projects. 

That means understanding product goals and business context and applying that understanding to guiding a small team of developers to successfully implement new features, identifying risks and removing blockers.

You will play a key role in our product and delivery process. You will provide input to requirements and specification, you’ll lead discussions on domain model design and implementation planning. And you will shape how developers working on the project work together to implement robust, maintainable code.

This is a coding role, so you’ll be writing code, tests, and debugging issues, and will provide significant development work to the projects. You’ll take the lead on applying high standards of code quality and development best practices.

Be a key part of our development team

We’re a young team, you’ll help shape our team’s process and help us make technical decisions to make us effective and a great place to work as a developer.

We need you to support developers by answering questions and offering support when needed, or pairing on complex problems. Also we’d like you to be a named mentor for one junior developer.

And to advance technical excellence at Oyster by researching new tools and practices, taking initiative on technical improvements and refactorings, and moving best practice forward through pairing, discussions in the team.

Experience and skills

We’d like to see:

• at least 7 years experience as a software developer
• expert use of Ruby, in addition to use of JavaScript
• experience as tech lead of development teams
• experience as principal or lead developer for large, complex software projects

Skills we’re looking for:

• software architecture thinking, such as API design, database schema design, services and patterns for robust, secure code
• experience participating in a product process from idea to delivery

Will this role be a great fit for you?

• You thrive working in a team and being supportive of others.
• You’re confident about being the most senior developer on your team, and able to set your own high standards about software implementation.
• You’re flexible enough to switch between different modes of working, such as programming, technical design, mentoring.
• You take initiative and ownership: moving projects forward.

To see more about this role and about working at Oyster, click here.

Check out our public notion and see for yourself:  Welcome to Oyster!

Here are some pages you might be interested in:

Mission, Vision, Values at Oyster

Why Oyster is a Distributed Company

How We Work Together at Oyster

Automating processes to hire and manage people across 100 countries is hard. Doing so while creating a delightful experience for our users, with robust and maintainable software, and a customizable and flexible platform, is very, very hard. This is the challenge you’ll be taking on if you come to work for Oyster.

Our team. We have have a team of about 8 developers, 2 designers, 2 in product. We’re growing fast.

Our technology. Currently a GraphQL API running in Ruby and Rails, with React and ApolloClient in JavaScript on the frontend. We are running on Heroku.

Hours. We have a daily Zoom standup at 12pm GMT. We need developers to normally have significant overlap (say, three to four hours) with the hours of 9am – 6pm GMT, but otherwise your working time is very flexible.

We use Kanban, and have a monthly cadence of product investigation, delivery, and time for technical sustainability. (We’re on Linear.app.) We have fortnightly retrospectives.

Team We have weekly dev team meetings to discuss plans for the platform, where everyone is encouraged to bring topics, and regular brown bag lunch sessions are encouraged for developers to make presentations.

Hackathons and hack days. We have monthly hack days for developers to work on things they are interested in, and quarterly multi-day Hackathons bringing in people from other parts of the business together with product and development.

• Flexible hours
• 25 days holiday plus public holidays
• Budget of $3,000 for your home office, including a new laptop.
• Access to growing suite of employee benefits