Staff Engineer / Team Lead (Ruby on Rails)

We're hiring a Staff Engineer / Team Lead (Ruby on Rails)!

Summary

• Flexible Title: Can tailor to reflect your skills & experience.
• Flexible Time: Can do full-time, part-time, side-gig (off-hours), or fractional (contract).
• Flexible Commitment: Can do short-term, long-term, or intermittent.

Why so flexible? We're a FUNDED startup racing to launch beginning of Q3 2026. That gives us just 2 months to stack features while raising additional working capital. Feel free to jump in, help us ship, then bounce >> or stick around. A successful launch translates into lots of permanent jobs for those that want them. We're also interested in long term "side gig" relationships, if that's what you're into - in our experience, a few expert hours often beat full-time learning-curve hours.

About Us

We're a credible, funded , remote-first startup led by a serial [technical] founder, and backed by a 20-person team. The product is live in private alpha.

Learn more about our founder, team, and comp structures at list-lab.org .

About The Role

This is a high-velocity individual contributor role with product ownership — not a people-management position. You set the bar for how fast great Rails code ships, and you do it by being the person who's best at directing AI to multiply output.

We believe working with AI is a lot like working with a brilliant but inexperienced junior developer: it can produce enormous volume, but only if you know how to define the work, decompose it into right-sized pieces, and review output with a critical eye . If you've ever been the senior who made a team of juniors wildly productive — not by doing their work, but by giving them crystal-clear specs and fast feedback — this role is built for you.

This is also a product-forward role . We're not hiring a separate product manager for this team. You'll work directly with stakeholders to figure out what needs to be built, not just how to build it. You should genuinely enjoy that part — talking to users, unpacking requirements, making scope calls, and translating business problems into shippable slices.

Compensation

Up to $350,000 max total compensation in Tier 1 cities; cash and equity components to be negotiated (amount reflects combined cash and equity components).

What Success Looks Like in 30 Days

• You're shipping production Rails features at a pace that makes the rest of the team recalibrate what "fast" means
• You've established a personal workflow for AI-assisted development that demonstrably multiplies your output — and you're sharing what works
• You've taken ownership of at least one product area: you know the stakeholders, you understand what they need, and you're making scope and prioritization calls confidently
• You're decomposing work into well-specified, right-sized tickets that AI (and other developers) can execute against cleanly
• The code you're shipping and reviewing is clean, well-tested, and production-ready — velocity without quality doesn't count

What You'll Do

• Ship Rails features fast — own the full cycle from stakeholder conversation to production deployment, using AI tooling to maximize throughput
• Define and decompose work — break ambiguous business problems into well-specified, right-sized tickets that serve as both alignment artifacts and AI prompts
• Own product for your area — work directly with stakeholders to understand what needs to be built, make scope and prioritization decisions, and ensure what ships actually solves the problem
• Set the velocity standard — demonstrate what's possible when a senior engineer combines deep Rails expertise with disciplined AI-assisted workflows
• Review and elevate — review PRs, validate AI-generated output, and raise the quality bar across the codebase
• Collaborate on architecture — contribute to technical decisions on Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, and related infrastructure
• Document what works — capture patterns, workflows, and decomposition strategies that help the whole team move faster

What We're Looking For

• Deep Ruby on Rails expertise — you've built and shipped production Rails applications and you know the framework inside and out (PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, Active Job, etc.)
• Proven AI-assisted development chops — you're already using AI tooling (Cursor, Copilot, or similar) to ship meaningfully faster, and you have opinions about what works and what doesn't
• The "senior who makes juniors productive" skillset — you know how to specify work clearly enough that someone (or something) less experienced can execute it well. You give great direction, catch issues early in review, and don't waste cycles on rework
• Product instincts — you genuinely enjoy talking to stakeholders, understanding user problems, and making calls about what to build and what to cut. You've done this before, whether or not your title said "product"
• Velocity as a value — you care about shipping. You find ways to move fast without cutting corners. You're allergic to unnecessary process and drawn to approaches that compress cycle time
• Strong decomposition skills — you can take a large, ambiguous objective and break it into concrete, well-scoped pieces of work. You think in dependency trees, not to-do lists
• Comfort with startup ambiguity — you thrive when things aren't fully figured out, and you're energized (not paralyzed) by the need to make decisions with incomplete information

Nice to Have

• Experience in a staff engineer, tech lead, or principal engineer role at a startup or high-growth company
• Familiarity with spec-driven workflows
• Experience working without a dedicated product manager — you've been the person who figured out what to build
• Background in marketplace, SaaS, or consumer-facing Rails applications
• Experience building or contributing to AI-augmented development workflows at an organizational level