Senior Software Engineer

About the position

As the leading end-to-end investment platform for single-family rental homes (SFR), our mission is to make real estate investing radically accessible, cost effective, and simple. We successfully merge our passion for helping investors build wealth through real estate with cutting edge technology that transforms the way they do it. Stessa is a product within Roofstock that helps real estate investors run their rental property business. We are seeking an accomplished Senior Backend Engineer with extensive expertise in Ruby and Rails to work with our passionate and collaborative team to deliver new products. If you have a proven track record of building robust web applications, solving complex technical challenges, and thrive in a fast-paced environment, we want to hear from you!

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable, high-performance backend services using Ruby on Rails, ensuring reliability, efficiency, and compliance with financial security standards.
• Architect and optimize financial transaction processing workflows, including payment processing, bank integrations, and fraud detection mechanisms.
• Define and implement best practices for backend architecture, focusing on durability, scalability, and security, particularly in handling sensitive financial data.
• Design and implement RESTful APIs to support web applications and integrations, ensuring robust, well-documented, and efficient data flow.
• Improve application performance, monitoring, and alerting strategies to maintain high system availability and responsiveness.
• Contribute to backend infrastructure development, including CI/CD pipelines, containerized deployments, and cloud-based services (AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes).
• Strengthen application security through best practices in authentication, authorization, and data protection, ensuring compliance with industry standards.
• Provide technical leadership, mentor junior engineers, and establish best practices in backend development.
• Work closely with product managers, designers, and frontend engineers to build and ship user-facing features efficiently.
• Stay updated on emerging technologies and industry best practices, driving continuous improvement in development processes.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in backend development with Ruby on Rails in a senior or lead role.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
• Proven experience working in FinTech, particularly in payments, banking integrations, or financial transaction processing.
• Strong proficiency in relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and experience with database design and query optimization.
• Experience building and maintaining RESTful APIs and integrating with third-party services.
• Proficiency in scaling backend systems, optimizing performance, and implementing caching strategies.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and services such as AWS (RDS, Lambda, SQS, ECS) and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment processes.
• Strong understanding of observability, including monitoring, logging, and alerting best practices.
• Strong understanding of security best practices, particularly in financial applications, payment processing, and sensitive data protection, including authentication, authorization, and compliance with industry standards such as PCI DSS.
• Experience with agile development methodologies and working in a collaborative, fast-paced environment.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to work cross-functionally with engineering, product, and design teams.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with Elasticsearch or other search technologies.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and messaging systems.
• Prior experience in a high-growth startup or SaaS environment.
• Understanding of financial data compliance requirements (PCI, SOC 2, etc.), and risk mitigation strategies.
• Experience with React development.

Benefits

• Generous PTO Policy
• 13 Paid Holidays
• Volunteer Time Off
• Paid Parental Leave
• 401k Program
• Wellness and home office/cell phone subsidies
• Robust health, dental, vision insurance, and more