Staff Rails Engineer - US

HappyCo is a company where people can grow their careers and work with like minded people, with no egos or politics. HappyCo is values driven and offers a flexible, supportive culture. Join HappyCo and Make Work Happy!
We’re looking for a Staff Rails Engineer to help us align and guide engineering efforts across multiple teams while mentoring, helping unblock teams, and ensuring alignment. We’re hoping that you can help us continue to foster a culture of mentorship and technical excellence while delivering value to our customers.
HappyCo is a PropTech startup that's been around for more than a decade. We primarily build workflow-focused apps for the multifamily segment (think apartment complexes). We’re currently undergoing unprecedented growth and expect to sustain this for some time to come.
Our product experience teams each have empowered triads -- a product manager, lead designer, and lead engineer -- who work together as a cohesive unit to discover customer problems and build solutions that solve customers’ problems, meet our usability standards, are feasible to build, and viable for our business.
Each empowered product team is measured by business outcomes, not output or stakeholder-driven roadmaps, and is empowered to determine the best solution to meet business outcomes. In your role, you will need to apply a holistic product lens in your management of the engineers in achieving their team outcomes.
Our engineering team was previously exclusively in Australia, but we’ve been growing our team across the Americas since early 2022. This role is 100% remote (Americas based) and reports to our Head of Engineering in the U.S.
Week by Week

During your first two weeks you will:

• Get to know our leadership, culture, and values
• Complete our HappyCo orientation and onboarding program
• Familiarize yourself with our systems and tools 
• Read our favorite industry primers
• Attend your first Company Wide Meeting

During your first 1-3 months you will:

• Get acquainted with our product team triads
• Share insights to help improve our hiring and onboarding processes
• Present your first strategy document including measurable goals and success criteria
• Facilitate a team-building event that fosters a culture of collaboration and growth 

During your first 6-12 months you will:

• Organize & Support: Provide high-level technical advice to Engineering Leadership, help teams become unblocked on technical challenges, mentor teammates and foster growth outside of the line management model, and set the example of developing software thoughtfully and iteratively
• Architect & Guide: Work with Engineering Leads and peers to design the overarching system architecture and communicate this architecture across all teams, provide architectural guardrails and principles that help shape how new products are built, and ensure new components and services undergo appropriate architectural review while providing guidance around tradeoffs
• Support Key Initiatives: Support Engineering Leads and peers to transition our Rails monolith onto a federated graph, evaluate approaches and support implementation of an event-driven architecture and global identifiers
• Support Observability: Work with Engineering Leadership and product teams to define appropriate SLOs in accordance with customer SLAs, and support Engineering Leads to leverage Honeycomb for their observability use cases

What we think you need to be successful:

• 8 or more years of experience in software engineering
• 3 or more years of experience working in Rails monoliths
• Experience coordinating multi-quarter, multi-team technical projects while enabling teams to ship iteratively
• Demonstrated ability to build systems that maintain a balance between time-to-market, usability, and technical architecture
• An affinity for cross-functional team collaboration with the ability to think rigorously and make hard decisions and tradeoffs
• Ability to maintain high code quality while focusing on progress over perfection

How we build at HappyCo

• Our customer-facing Product vision
• How our product teams are organized (external summary)

Technologies - We have two Rails codebases:

• One Rails monolith houses a number of different product domains. The application is on Rails 7, Ruby 3, and PostgreSQL, tested with RSpec and Capybara, and uses K8s and GCP for infrastructure. The application is primarily server-rendered and leverages Hotwire for interactive components.
• One monolith with a Rails backend (running on Rails 6, Ruby 2.6, and PostgreSQL) and React on the front-end, with Cypress for end-to-end tests. This application is deployed to AWS.

N