Rails Specialist

We want Fly.io to be the best place on the Internet to run Ruby on Rails apps, and especially Hotwire. If you’re a Rails developer that’s enthusiastic about Hotwire, we need your help.

Here’s Fly.io’s not-so-secret evil plan. We make it easy to run full-stack apps—any app, in any framework—close to your users. We’re a simple and powerful way to run any application, with modern dev UX, advanced Postgres deployments with replication, and app scaling knobs that don’t require you to learn Terraform to use. But we’re especially shiny for frameworks that benefit from geographic distribution, like Elixir’s LiveView, Laravel’s Livewire and Ruby on Rail’s Hotwire. We want those kinds of frameworks to succeed, because the better they do, the more valuable we are.

The business goal for this Rails job is, of course, to make Fly.io more attractive to Rails developers. But the job isn’t simply advocacy; we’re not just looking for cheerleaders. Rather, we’re looking for people who can make substantive contributions both to Fly.io and, more importantly, to Rails and Hotwire itself. If you can develop Rails features that are useful to everybody, including people who don’t use Fly.io and never will, that’s great for us! Anything that makes Rails more effective makes Fly.io more valuable.

We think Fly.io is a pretty great place to deploy a Rails app today. But it could be much better. So we’re also interested in contributions you can make to the dev UX at Fly.io. Some of that might just be expert feedback on what Fly.io should be doing differently to make things more pleasant for Rails developers. Some of it might be new feature ideas. And a lot of it will probably just be helping Rails/Hotwire developers better understand what we’re about at Fly.io.

We don’t expect you to be an expert on Fly.io, it just so happens that we already are that! We need your help to understand the needs of the Rails’ Hotwire community and framework. You will help pave the way to make Fly.io an even better platform for Rails and Hotwire developers.

We’ve been hiring people to do this kind of work for Elixir and LiveView for about a year now, and it’s been a huge success for us (so much so that people are starting to think of us as an Elixir company!) Here’s your chance to get people to start thinking of Fly.io as a Rails company, too. Represent!

About us and about the job

This is a mid to senior level job. The salary ranges from $120k to $200k USD. We also offer competitive equity grants. Hopefully that’s enough to keep you intrigued, here’s what you should really care about:

• We’re a small team, almost entirely technical.
• We are active in developer communities, including our own at community.fly.io. Part of this role is helping to answer support questions specific to Rails running on Fly. Providing meaningful troubleshooting and diagnosis information in most posts.
• Virtually all customer communication, documentation, and blog posts are in writing. We are a global company, but most of our communication is in English. Clear writing in English is essential.
• We are remote, with team members in Colorado, Quebec, Chicago, London, Mexico, Spain, Virginia, Brazil, Utah, and more! Most internal communication is also written, and often asynchronous. You’ll want to be comfortable with not getting an immediate response for everything, but also know when you need to get an immediate response for something.
• We are an unusually public team; you’d want to be comfortable working in open channels rather than secretively over in a dark corner.
• This could be a great job for someone who loves Rails and Hotwire, thinks it’s the best thing ever, and wants other people to discover how awesome it gets when you serve pages physically closer to your users.
• We’re a real company – hopefully that goes without saying – and this is a real, according-to-Hoyle full-time job with health care for US employees, flexible vacation time, hardware/phone allowances, the standard stuff. The senior level compensation for this role is $160k-$200k USD plus equity. We are also looking for some junior level members to join the team. So we’d like to hear from you too!

What you’ll do

• Help maintain and improve the initial “Run a Rails App” Getting Started Guide. We’ll help answer questions about the Fly.io side.
• Be a public presence in the Rails community. This just means that you post about the cool things you’re doing and engage with others in the community; in particular, it means being helpful to Rails developers everywhere, regardless of where they deploy their applications.
• Create a sample Rails Hotwire app that demonstrates how to take advantage of what the Fly.io platform provides. You won’t be alone on this either, we can help you with ideas and Fly.io platform features. We need someone who can handle the Rails side.
• Help guide other Rails developers as they come the platform. That may include engaging in the community.fly.io forums where people have Rails or Hotwire specific questions. For Fly.io platform questions, you won’t be able to answer those right away and that’s expected, we have platform focused people who handle that. We need help with the easy “Oh, you just need to configure X!” stuff specific to Rails.
• Write articles for Ruby Dispatch that are genuinely helpful for other Rails Hotwire developers. That might be a how-to, coverage of an upcoming Rails or Hotwire feature, or an article about how to build Turbo Native Hotwire apps.

You might enjoy this job if you

• Enjoy using Hotwire and want more people to see the benefits you see. You enjoy sharing and showing others.
• Want more people to understand Hotwire and start using it.
• Have good instincts for balancing competing customer demands.
• Are comfortable with software development. Our customers are developers, so knowing how to build apps is important. Bonus points if you are familiar with how to make it run on Fly.io.
• Have general knowledge about deploying and supporting Rails apps in production.
• Work on Turbo Native or Electron apps and want to make them feel faster and snappier by running the Rails server closer to users on Fly.io.
• Like some structure, but are comfortable with not having a standard playbook for most things. You also like putting some structure in place where there isn’t any, and are open to trying new things if something isn’t working.

You’ll know you’re succeeding in this job if

• Other Rails Hotwire developers can follow your guides to successfully deploy their apps on Fly.io.
• As you identify shortcomings, you update documentation or work with other team members to help improve Fly tooling to make deployment a smoother process.
• Awareness of Fly.io in the Rails and Hotwire community is going up. People are talking about it without you starting the conversation.
• You are influencing Rails developer behavior.

How We Hire People

We are weird about hiring. We’re skeptical of resumes and we don’t trust interviews (we’re happy to talk, though). We respect career experience but we aren’t hypnotized by it, and we’re thrilled at the prospect of discovering new talent.

The premise of our hiring process is that we’re going to show you the kind of work we’re doing and then see if you enjoy actually doing it; “work-sample challenges”. Unlike a lot of places that assign “take-home problems”, our challenges are the backbone of our whole process; they’re not pre-screeners for an interview gauntlet.

For this role, we’re going to ask you to create a “recipe” and a sample project. We’ll give you the problem to solve and provide the recipe format to use. A recipe is a simple “problem and solution” format for writing a blog post.

If you’re interested, mail jobs+rails@fly.io. You can tell us a bit about yourself, if you like.