Backend Team Lead — Ruby on Rails

We operate an edge-to-cloud video AI platform used in live environments today. Edge nodes run on NVIDIA Jetson and process camera streams in real time. The cloud stack delivers stable APIs, WebSockets for live updates, and integrations with public-safety and enterprise systems. Your work will extend an active codebase, improve latency and reliability, and ship new features on a steady cadence.

Role

Own technical design and delivery quality for complex Rails systems. Turn business goals into pragmatic architecture; coach engineers; keep performance, security, and operability non-negotiable.

What you’ll lead

• Service architecture: API gateway, Rails API services, background workers, websockets.
• Data plane: durable eventing, queues, back-pressure, exactly-once where it counts.
• AuthN/Z and policy: JWT, mTLS, RBAC/ABAC, OPA/Rego policy checks.
• Data stores and models: PostgreSQL schema design, partitioning, migrations, indexing.
• Caching and realtime: Redis for cache/pubsub; ActionCable or alternative WS hub.
• Integrations: REST/XML adapters to external agencies and enterprise systems.
• Observability: metrics, logs, traces, red/black dashboards, SLO burn alerts.
• CI/CD and environments: build pipelines, artifact signing, staged releases, rollbacks.
• Reliability: incident response, on-call rotation, postmortems, runbooks.

Core responsibilities

• Design and ship Rails API-only services with clean boundaries and idempotent endpoints.
• Define protobuf/JSON schemas for events and external adapters. Version them.
• Stand up event streaming (Kafka or NATS JetStream) and DLQs.
• Build background jobs (Sidekiq) and scheduled workflows with retries and circuit breakers.
• Implement pagination, filtering, and consistent error contracts.
• Enforce security: secrets management, mTLS, request signing, rate limiting, audit logging.
• Implement data retention and privacy controls for media and PII.
• Lead code reviews, pairing, and technical roadmap.

Must-have experience

• 5+ years building production backends, 3+ with Rails at scale.
• Designed multi-service systems with queues/streams and strong data modeling.
• PostgreSQL performance: query plans, indexes, partitions, and migration strategy.
• Secure API design: OAuth/JWT, mTLS, key rotation, rate limiting, audit.
• Realtime delivery: websockets or SSE at scale with fan-out control.
• Observability and SLOs: RED/USE metrics, tracing, alerting that avoids noise.
• Leading a team: setting goals, unblocking, code quality, and shipping on a cadence.

Nice to have

• Policy enforcement with OPA/Rego.
• Media delivery basics (HLS/WebRTC) and large object handling.
• Experience with public-safety or regulated integrations.
• SBOMs, supply-chain security, artifact signing.