For a test suite people still trust enough to run
Hire Ruby Developers
Ruby and Rails reward a team that respects convention and quietly punish one that doesn't, because a clever shortcut today tends to become an undebuggable mystery in six months. These engineers are tested against that exact failure mode, then placed inside the codebase and test culture your team actually depends on.
- Profiles typically within two business days
- Replacement Assurance: If an engineer is not the right fit, a replacement from our own team starts within ten business days of your request, at no extra cost
- You interview before placement if you want to
- At least four hours a day inside your core working hours. Two hours plus a daily written handover for the US West Coast
- 14-Day Risk-Free Trial: For your first engineer on a time-and-materials engagement. Up to 14 calendar days or 80 logged working hours, whichever comes first. End within the trial and pay nothing for trial hours. Continue beyond it and those hours are billed at the agreed rate. Unpaid trial work remains ours if you stop
How we evaluate a Ruby engineer
The tasks, the signals and the onboarding, walked through by the people who run them.
90 secSample frame · video pending01Published, not promised
The assessment behind every engineer we send.
The Ruby bar is published, not assumed: five competencies, the exact task behind each, and the shortcut that ends a candidacy. Most interviews ask about gems used. This one asks whether the codebase stays maintainable.
What we listen forWhether they know when to break convention deliberately, not by accident.
A feature does not fit Rails' usual conventions cleanly. Walk us through how you would decide whether to follow convention anyway or deviate from it.
- What strong sounds like
- Weighs the long-term maintainability cost of deviating against the awkwardness of forcing the convention, with a clear reason either way.
- What gives us pause
- Forces the feature into Rails convention regardless of fit, or breaks convention without weighing the maintainability cost.
Ruby · Rails · Sidekiq
ActiveRecord · PostgreSQL · Redis
RSpec · FactoryBot · Capybara
Bundler · Docker · RuboCop
02Who you actually meet
The bench, priced by seniority.
Three seniority tiers, priced honestly, and the engineers who fill each one today. Real names and photos take their place as soon as we can share them, and the standard stays exactly the same.
Engineer
Features scoped tightly enough to ship inside your review bar, every time.
The right first hire when your seniors already set the standard.
$2,300–3,000per month
Senior
The hard module nobody else wants to own, taken end to end.
Ownership of a surface, without adding a manager to your headcount.
$3,300–4,200per month
Lead
The workstream's decisions, made daily, so nothing waits on a meeting.
One accountable voice for a pod or initiative that can't afford to drift.
$4,500–5,700per month
Ruby engineer
3 yrs · US East overlap
Diagnosed and fixed an N+1 query pattern slowing a heavily used listing page
- Ruby
- Rails
- RSpec
Senior Ruby engineer
7 yrs · UK + EU hours
Added dead-letter handling that turned a silent job failure into a same-day fix
- Sidekiq
- ActiveRecord
- PostgreSQL
Lead Ruby engineer
9 yrs · EU + US split
Cut a forty-five-minute test suite down to a size the team trusts and runs again
- Architecture
- FactoryBot
- Redis
- RuboCop
Indicative ranges, representative profiles. Exact figures and named engineers arrive with your shortlist.
Weighing this against a freelancer, a direct hire or a marketplace? See the honest comparison
03From stated problem to first change
Four steps, each closing on evidence.
This process tests judgement about Rails conventions, not gem trivia. You can walk away after any step without owing us a thing.
Define the reliability problem
We map where your application's convention, jobs or test suite are actually under strain. The brief names that gap, not a list of gems to know.
A brief your leads signMatch against your codebase
Candidates are screened against your actual Rails version, your job queue and your review culture. Three engineers who understand your codebase beat thirty who list Ruby on a CV.
Three fits, not thirty CVsAssess on the real tasks
Your team can watch the N+1 diagnosis and background-job exercises directly. What shows up is Rails judgement, not familiarity with a trendy gem.
Evaluation you can watchOnboard inside your process
Access, standards and a first bounded, tested change to real production code. Continuity cover keeps a departure from ever becoming your emergency.
A merged change in week one
04Evidence and proof
Engineers who made Rails maintainable again.
Ruby proof is convention respected under real pressure, not a clever trick that impressed once. Every record here waits for written client approval before production.
Explore case studies
A silent job failure that stopped being silent.
Pillar Learning's enrollment-confirmation job had been failing silently for two weeks before a support ticket revealed it. An embedded Ruby engineer added dead-letter handling and alerting so the next failure would be caught within minutes.
- Time to detect a job failure
- From two weeks to minutes
- Affected enrollments recovered
- All, manually reprocessed
He simplified metaprogramming nobody on our team could safely touch, without breaking a single behaviour we depended on.
Sample · pending client approval
Our test suite went from something people skipped to something the team actually trusts again.
Sample · pending client approval
05Three shapes, one standard
Add an engineer, a reliability pod, or a practice.
Most teams start with one engineer working inside the existing application. Some need a pod that owns reliability and performance end to end. Where a product needs building from the ground up rather than maintaining, we point you to the practice instead.
- Team extension
One named engineer
A single Ruby specialist inside your direction and your reviews. The smallest commitment, and the usual first step.
- Delivery pods
A reliability pod
A pod with its own lead that owns background-job reliability and query performance end to end. You set priorities while the pod carries delivery.
- Product engineering
The practice, not the person
Where a product needs building from the ground up rather than maintaining, product engineering takes that scope on instead.
06Straight answers
Asked before a Ruby hire is signed.
01What does a Ruby engineer actually do day to day?
Follows and occasionally deliberately breaks Rails convention, keeps background jobs failing loudly instead of silently, and hunts down N+1 queries before they reach production. The unglamorous majority of the work is keeping a test suite fast enough that people actually run it.
02Do you hire for a specific Rails version?
Matched to your actual version and upgrade path. Judgement about convention and reliability transfers across versions, then the evaluation confirms familiarity with yours.
03Can we run our own interviews as well?
Yes, the published tasks are built to be reused directly. Several clients now run the N+1 diagnosis exercise themselves in later hiring rounds.
04How fast can a Ruby engineer start?
A shortlist arrives within days from a bench evaluated continuously. Actual start speed from there hinges on how quickly your team can provision repository access.
05Who manages the engineer day to day?
Your leads run the standups and hold the review bar. We take on the employment side instead: continuity, payroll, replacement risk and the handoff work when plans change.
06What if the engineer is not the right fit?
Let us know early and the replacement is on us, no argument. The next engineer is walked through the specific reason, so second misses are rare.
07Do your Ruby developers use AI coding tools?
Yes, openly. AI drafts boilerplate and RSpec scaffolding quickly; the engineer stays accountable for every convention decision, reliability fix and merge that reaches your codebase.
08How does pricing work for a hired Ruby engineer?
The tier bands above frame the honest range; the shortlist confirms the exact figure once scope is set. Monthly billing, no placement fee, notice-period exit only.