Engineering
Ruby on Rails Engineer
Bird handles pickup, delivery, and shipping scheduling for thousands of Shopify stores. When a time slot is wrong, a delivery rate fails to appear at checkout, or a timezone quietly moves an order to the wrong day, a real merchant can lose a real sale. This is the kind of problem you'll be trusted to solve.
You won't just pick up tickets and wait for the next task. You'll own problems from understanding what needs to be solved to deciding how to solve them, building the solution, and getting it into production. You'll work with a small team, move quickly, and see your work reach merchants within days.
What you'll work with
- Ruby on Rails
- React and JavaScript
- PostgreSQL
- Redis and Sidekiq
- Shopify APIs and app extensions
You don't need to know everything on day one. Strong fundamentals, good engineering judgement, and the ability to learn quickly matter more than checking every box.
What you'll own
- Own features and technical problems end to end: understand the requirement, choose the approach, build it, get it reviewed, test it, and ship it.
- Make technical decisions independently and explain why you made them.
- Write simple, maintainable code that the next engineer can change without fear. Simple beats clever.
- Investigate production issues properly. Work backwards from the symptoms to find the real cause, not the first plausible answer.
- Think about edge cases, performance, and reliability before they become incidents.
- Improve the architecture when it genuinely needs improving, and leave it alone when it doesn't.
- Work across the stack when the problem requires it, including APIs, databases, integrations, and infrastructure.
- Review code and help other engineers get better through feedback, mentoring, and technical guidance.
- Raise risks and blockers early. A blocker raised on day one is a conversation. The same blocker raised on day ten is a fire.
- Understand the merchant problem behind the code. The goal isn't to complete a task. It's to solve the right problem.
- Work directly with the founder on product and architecture decisions that matter.
What we're looking for
- 4+ years of substantial Ruby on Rails experience. We care more about what you can actually do than the number on your resume.
- Strong backend and web fundamentals, including data modelling, API design, background jobs, and production systems.
- A real ownership instinct. You finish things, and you notice when something isn't actually finished.
- Strong debugging judgement. You investigate before guessing and look for the root cause.
- Comfortable opening unfamiliar code and figuring out how it works.
- Able to work independently without needing someone to tell you what to do every morning.
- Clear written and verbal communication. A lot of the thinking here happens in text before it happens in code.
- Willing to challenge a requirement or approach when you believe there's a better way, and able to explain why.
- Comfortable working across different parts of a product when the problem requires it.
- You care about engineering quality, but you don't use perfection as an excuse to move slowly.
- You enjoy helping other engineers become better.
- Shopify experience is useful, but strong engineering ability matters more than Shopify experience.
This might not be the right role for you
If you prefer to receive a fully specified ticket, build exactly what it describes, and hand it back, this role will probably frustrate you.
A lot of the work here starts as a half-formed problem rather than a perfectly defined task. Understanding what actually needs to be built, questioning the obvious approach, and turning it into the right solution is part of your job.
You may not enjoy this role if you:
- Need someone to tell you what to work on every morning.
- Prefer a predictable queue of clearly defined tickets.
- Wait for someone else to solve blockers for you.
- Dislike taking responsibility when something goes wrong.
- Need layers of meetings and approvals before making decisions.
- Prefer to stay strictly within one narrow technical area.
- See your responsibility as finished when your assigned task is complete.
If you see a problem and think, "I'll figure it out," we'd like to hear from you.
How we hire for this role
- 01
Application
A person reads every application. If we think there could be a fit, we'll reach out for the next step.
- 02
Initial conversation
About 45 minutes. What you have built, what you owned, where it went wrong and what you did about it. Real questions about real work.
- 03
Technical round
Around 90 minutes on a problem close to something we have actually had to solve. Use whatever tools you normally use, AI included. We are watching how you reason, not whether you memorised anything.
- 04
Cultural round
A conversation about how you work, communicate, take ownership, handle feedback, and work with a small team.
- 05
Conversation with the founder
Scope, standards, how we work, compensation. Bring hard questions.
- 06
Offer
Usually within a few days of the last conversation.
Practical ability counts for more with us than a polished interview. If you think clearly but interview badly, the exercise is where that shows, and it is the part we weigh most.
Apply
Apply for Ruby on Rails Engineer
Short on purpose. The two written answers are the part we actually read closely, so give them the time and skip the cover-letter voice.