Senior Fullstack Engineer (Ruby+React)

Our client is a full-service digital product agency. They build businesses at the intersection of content and commerce, and since 2020, we've been focused on the creator economy and online education space.

We're a distributed team based in Canada. For this project specifically, a good part of the client team is based in Europe, so we're looking for candidates in EST or compatible timezones (anywhere from Eastern North America through Western/Central Europe) with strong overlap to a EST/CET working day.

This is a temporary contract role. Anticipated start date is as soon as possible.

About the project

You'll be joining a major build for one of our clients, a leading platform in the creator economy. They're rolling out a native Community feature that gives their users' most engaged audiences a place to gather, talk, and come back between sends, unlocking a premium upsell and stronger retention for the platform.

The project is mid-development by the time you start, with a beta window and a release event planned for later this year. You'll be embedded into a small, focused team and shipping production code from day one.

About the role

We're looking for a senior full-stack engineer comfortable working primarily in Ruby on Rails and React, who can drop into an existing codebase, ramp up quickly, and start delivering meaningful tickets within the first few weeks. You'll work alongside our existing engineering leads on this engagement, share planning and working sessions with the broader client team, and contribute directly to features being shipped to end users.

The stack is Ruby on Rails with Postgres and Redis Docker for local dev), a React frontend, with real-time and feed infrastructure powered by Stream.io. We use GitHub for code management and Linear for ticketing.

This role is hands-on. There's no Rare Days PM on this engagement (the client owns PM, so we're looking for someone who is self-directed, communicates clearly, and can operate effectively inside a client's processes and rituals.

Responsibilities

- Build and ship full-stack features across the Rails service layer and the React frontend on the client's community platform

- Pick up tickets from the Linear board, scope your own work, and deliver production-quality code with strong test coverage

- Participate in the client's sprint rituals, demos, and touchpoints, speaking confidently about technical decisions, trade-offs, and delivery status

- Collaborate closely with the existing engineers on the project (your primary pair during ramp-up) and with the client's internal engineers and PM

- Help drive the team toward upcoming beta and release milestones, flagging risks early and proposing solutions, not just problems

- Contribute to architecture and integration discussions where relevant (e.g. real-time infrastructure, feed/messaging via Stream, performance and scaling questions)

- Write code reviews that raise the bar without slowing the team down

Requirements:
What we're looking for

- 7+ years of full-stack engineering experience, with substantial production work in Ruby on Rails and React

- Comfortable in a Rails monolith of meaningful size. You can navigate an unfamiliar codebase, find the patterns, and make changes that match the existing conventions rather than fighting them

- Strong with Postgres (writing efficient queries, understanding indexing, reasoning about migrations on a live database) and familiar with Redis in a caching or background-job context

- Experience working with React in a production app (component patterns, state management, integrating with a Rails backend)

- You've worked on apps where real-time features, multi-tenancy, or scale are real concerns, and you have opinions about the trade-offs (familiarity with ActionCable/AnyCable, Stream.io, Pusher, or similar is a plus)

- You can communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences, and you're comfortable presenting your work directly to a client team

- You're self-directed: you can pick up a ticket, ask the right clarifying questions, and ship it without needing constant check-ins

- You're motivated by feedback and care about the craft. You'd rather raise a concern early than ship something you're not proud of

- Available to work in an EST or compatible timezone Eastern North America through Western/Central Europe), with strong overlap to a EST/CET working day for sprint rituals, pairing, and client touchpoints

- Comfortable working as a contractor

Nice to have

- Prior experience on creator-economy, publishing, or community products

- Background working as an embedded contractor inside a client's engineering team

- Familiarity with deploying Rails applications at scale Heroku, AWS, or similar)

- Experience integrating with third-party real-time / feed / chat services

Engagement details

Type: Temporary contract, full-time allocation

Location: Remote, EST or compatible timezone Eastern North America through Western/Central Europe)