Senior Ruby on Rails Developer

Posted by Scott Woods

Company Details

West Arete

State College, PA

FTE only

Description

We are a custom software development company that creates well-crafted software for a variety of purpose-driven organizations.

We work in small, highly-empowered teams that work closely with the client stakeholders. We believe that the best software comes from empathetic, knowledgeable developers working directly with subject matter experts.

We are well-disciplined in our use of Scrum, which allows us to manage stakeholder expectations early on and move projects from start to end at a sustainable pace.

Code quality, design, and test coverage are of paramount importance. Our software is typically in production use for many years to come, and must undergo continual change. We design, code, and test for the long run.

We believe that life is too short to spend our working years on anything but projects that make a positive impact. For example:

  • You would get to work on meaningful projects like the Living Wage Calculator. It’s a minimalist data-driven interface, but it has massive impact in government and corporate policy – it helped to give thousands of employees a raise overnight, to the people who needed it the most.
  • Or help us build an entirely new modern platform for Better Kid Care, the application that provides the online training for the bulk of the nation’s child care providers, teaching them about the safety, health, and development of our country’s children.
  • Or help us modernize the app that manages the metadata for the federated authentication system for Internet2, the nation’s largest and fastest network that connects our country’s leading research institutions, powering everything from particle physics research to neurosurgery.

Finally, we expect you to help us look towards the future. We were one of the early firms to be using Ruby on Rails professionally, and we were pretty early on the Scrum and TDD bandwagons, too. Now we’re looking to languages like Elixir for the next generation. Help us begin to responsibly incorporate these into our production projects.

Skills & Requirements

Technical skills:

  • Several years professional experience with the full Ruby on Rails stack.
  • Regular practitioner and advocate of test-driven development, or at least consistent, appropriate automated testing at multiple levels, with thorough coverage.
  • Sound knowledge of object-oriented design principles.
  • Thorough knowledge of relational databases.
  • Regular experience integrating with external APIs in a way that is modular and testable.

Here are the key qualities and capabilities that we look for in a developer:

  • Communicative. We work directly with informed, engaged client stakeholders. Middlemen and bottlenecks are eliminated. Each developer plays a primary role in client interactions and in project management.
  • Empathetic. We deeply concern ourselves with understanding where our clients are coming from, so that we can design the proper solution. We often spend more time designing the features with the client than writing code.
  • Sharp. We must be quick to learn about new business models and domain knowledge, since we work in a wide variety of industries.
  • Confident. We encounter many complex problems, and it’s not always technical complexity. You have to be comfortable wading into a situation where the path forward is not always apparent. Many of our projects start out as only a concept.
  • Studious. We are continually learning and sharpening our skills as software developers, and sharing our knowledge in a supportive manner with others.
  • Entrepreneurial. Being part of the team at West Arete involves contributing to a fluid, evolving process. There will be “failure” of our own internal experiments followed by improvement. Each individual plays a significant role in shaping the company.
  • Professional. We relentlessly pursue software craftsmanship and code elegance, but it’s tempered with the professional responsibility to adhere to schedules and budgets.

About West Arete

We have a strong internal drive for craftsmanship and improvement. We supply our employees with as much learning material as they can handle. We have two certified Scrum Masters and Product Owners (via no less than Scrum Inc). And we ensure that we carve out the appropriate time and budget for our team to build software to the best of their abilities, without stress.

We are a certified B Corporation. This means that we meet a rigorous third-party standard for our contributions to our employees, our community, and the environment. We are also a life-long member of 1% for the Planet, and we are a Silver-level Bike Friendly Business.

One of our most discussed benefits is that every West Arete employee gets a mandatory, fully-unplugged, one-month sabbatical every year. Yes, that is in addition to regular vacation time. Here is our founder’s TEDx talk on the subject.

We go all out for health care. West Arete pays the full cost of health, dental, and vision insurance for your entire family, with a zero-dollar deductible.

We pay a monthly bonus to employees who are able to walk or bike to work, and we pay a weekly incentive to employees that set and meet their own exercise goals for that week.

We love being located in State College, Pennsylvania. It’s vibrant, affordable, and safe. Many of us bike to work every day via the area’s bike lanes and bike paths. The school district is one of the better ones in the country. And there is amazing outdoor recreation right outside your doorstep.

How to Apply

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