Lead Ruby on Rails Engineer

Job Description

At SimplyTV, data is our business.

We are one of the leading companies worldwide in the media metadata market, with hundreds of customers around the world, including many of the big players in the industry, such as Amazon and Waipu, among many others.

As Media Metadata providers, our service consists of distributing information on TV channels, streaming services, programs, and all sorts of media-related information to our partners; always up to date with the latest updates and tailored to their very specific needs in terms of content, format, language, and region. If you have ever checked the TV guide to see what shows are available on your local TV stations or what the casting of your favorite Streaming show is, chances are that the same information you were seeking came from SimplyTV.

For that, we implemented the SimplyTV platform, a pipeline-like semi-automated infrastructure that works by parsing data from different endpoints and data providers, normalizing it, formatting it according to our end-user needs, and then serving it through different methods; in a 24/7 process monitored and controlled by editors who review, correct, and enhance the information.

About The Role, Team and Technology

As Lead Ruby on Rails Engineer at SimplyTV, you will own and evolve our mission-critical provisioning system, a 24/7 platform that delivers hundreds of gigabytes of metadata in highly customized formats to clients worldwide. You will lead key architectural decisions to ensure scalability, reliability, and performance as data volumes grow, while designing new technical solutions to support evolving customer needs and building internal tools for monitoring, control, and operational efficiency. You’ll guide and mentor a distributed team of 5+ engineers, working closely with the Director of Engineering and the broader SimplyTV Core team in a flat, collaborative, and learning-driven environment that values autonomy, pragmatism, and continuous improvement. Our stack is intentionally simple and consistent, built entirely on Ruby and Ruby on Rails, with Turbo, Stimulus, and ViewComponents on the frontend; MySQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, and background processing via Sidekiq and SolidQueue on the backend; and emerging messaging systems such as RabbitMQ, Kafka, and Amazon SQS. We run on AWS (EC2, ECS, Lambda, S3), monitor with CloudWatch and APMScout, and deploy through GitHub Actions and AWS CodePipeline. The team works fully remote, with high ownership and flexibility, supported by structured sprint planning, regular syncs, healthy PR reviews, and pairing sessions to share knowledge and grow together, so we can keep making content discovery simple, powerful, and inspiring.

Join us, and let’s make content discovery simple, powerful, and inspiring!

Responsibilities

You are successful when:

• You provide technical leadership to a development team with 5+ engineers while still contributing hands-on as an engineer.
• You take ownership of delivering normalized datasets (JSON, XML, CSV) via APIs, FTP, S3 buckets and similar channels, both architecting and implementing key components yourself.
• You oversee and directly support through hands-on development the creation and maintenance of internal tools used daily by hundreds of editors across multiple regions.
• You work closely with internal stakeholders, guiding the process of turning their needs into robust, scalable software solutions.
• You ensure reliable deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of services within our Ruby on Rails and AWS-based stack.
• You drive continuous improvement by gathering feedback from end users and iterating on tools and workflows.
• You identify, prioritize, and shape new workflows, dataflows, and tools where they create clear value for the business.
• You contribute to documentation, runbooks, and knowledge sharing to ensure team resilience and operational clarity.
• You lead data migration initiatives, evolving legacy systems and onboarding customers while ensuring data consistency, reliability, and minimal disruption.
• You adopt a customer-centric approach to architecture and delivery, ensuring scalable, sustainable solutions for a growing customer base.
• You oversee operational workflows, proactively identifying bottlenecks and driving improvements in reliability, performance, and effectiveness.
• You challenge the platform status quo, critically assessing components and proposing pragmatic, innovative solutions for evolution.

Requirements

Qualifications

You’ll thrive in this role if you:

• Bring 7+ years of experience as a software engineer with Ruby on Rails, cloud infrastructures, database management, background job systems, data pipelines, CI/CD, and modern web workflows.
• Lead engineers while staying actively hands-on in code, balancing architectural guidance, team processes, and day-to-day execution to deliver effective solutions.
• Are comfortable prioritizing work, assigning tasks, and aligning the team around clear goals, deadlines, and quality standards, ideally with experience in Agile or other iterative delivery methods.
• Possess excellent troubleshooting skills and a pragmatic, delivery-focused approach to problem-solving.
• Communicate clearly in written and spoken English and collaborate effectively across teams and functions, fostering transparency and psychological safety.
• Are curious and eager to learn, and not shy about doing R&D and exploring new technical approaches when they create value.
• Feel comfortable with changing priorities and a broad range of responsibilities, and are happy working independently and from home while staying closely connected to a distributed team.

Bonus

• Docker & Containerized Environments:

• AWS or equivalent Cloud Hosting Platforms.
  
• Experience with Heavy & Real-Time Data Pipelines:
• Managing and overseeing a critical and complex data pipeline.
  
• Solid understanding of Web UI Foundations:
• Familiarity with Component-Based UI frameworks.
• Expertise in building interfaces with TailwindCSS.
• Proficiency with Frontend JS. Our stack uses very little JS, and most of it is pure JS.

Why join?

• 🚀 Work at the forefront of media tech – Help shape how millions discover TV & streaming content.
  
  
• 🤝 Be a trusted counterpart – Work directly with key clients to drive their technical success and satisfaction.
  
  
• 🌍 Collaborate globally – Join a strong team across continents that thrives on innovation and teamwork.
  
  
• 🎯 Make real impact – Your contribution ensures Simply.TV’s data and solutions empower millions of end users daily.
  
  
• 📈 Grow and learn continuously – Gain exposure to advanced technologies, media systems, and client infrastructures.

Benefits

Practicalities

Reports to: Director of Engineering

Location: Europe (CET remote)

Type of Collaboration: collaboration based on a freelancer set-up on a full-time allocation basis (40 hours per week).