Experienced Ruby Engineer - Syncs Team

We start with the cliff notes about the position. If this appeals to you, continue reading for a longer text about working at Silverfin and your role.

At Silverfin, we're an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. Although we know we’re not perfect yet, we are working hard on it and always open for your feedback.

According to our vision to build a diverse, equitable and inclusive organisation, our policy is to only make a final hiring decision if underrepresented groups are sufficiently represented in the list of candidates applying for the position. For this reason it’s possible interviews get slightly delayed until we’ve reached that goal.

We're committed to elevating talent by creating an environment where we can all thrive together. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily check every single box, please consider applying. We'd love to hear how you might contribute to our mission and our team.

What can we offer you?

• Actual, proper work-life balance
• A salary range of €93.000 - €123.000 a year
• Flexible working hours and work 100% remotely
• Personal growth training and opportunities
• Join a distributed remote-first engineering team with 35 colleagues in 14 different countries on two continents
• A refreshing work environment with professional, friendly and welcoming colleagues
• A €1000 yearly budget for conferences, courses, workshops or other expenses that will improve your skills
• Two engineering retreats per year, somewhere in Europe
• For the fourth year in a row, we offer monthly company-wide Wellbeing Days for all employees (once a month in 2024, except in July and August)

What will you work on?

• You’re experienced in both Ruby and Rails, and also understand where the boundaries lie between them.

• You can code in Ruby without any of Rails’ training wheels if necessary.

• You enjoy integrating with APIs and aren’t easily dissuaded when encountering unreliable or poorly documented systems.

• You code with reason and can justify the important decisions you made during development.

• You can communicate clearly in English, both in writing and verbally.

• You’re up for mentoring coworkers and can give in-depth, productive feedback during code reviews. While you appreciate the small stuff, you recognise bike-shedding and can avoid its pitfalls.

• You know and can apply best practices when relevant. That means the usual like version control, testing, and refactoring; but also higher level concepts such as good object oriented design.

• You're aware of the trade-offs involved in proper engineering and can make balanced business decisions, keeping in mind all the stakeholders of the project.

• You’ve got opinions on code design and you can discuss them, but you’re professional enough to not let those opinions get in the way of a consensus if necessary.

If you’re any good at Ruby, this is probably not the first job ad you’ve seen, so we’ve done our best to stand out while also accurately presenting what we’re all about. If it sounds like you would enjoy working with us, don’t hesitate to apply or drop us a line with questions on engineering-jobs@silverfin.com, or read on for the more detailed explanation ..

What’s a Silverfin?

At Silverfin we’re trying to apply the promise of software to the age-old industry of accounting. With our SaaS we’re automating a large chunk of the busy-work that accountants are currently handling manually, and are building new tools so they can provide better services to their customers. We aim to optimise their workflow in such a way that accountants can spend more time on the much more impactful and rewarding work of advising their customers, the business owners.

The good news is we’re succeeding in doing exactly that. Every week more than 15.000 financial service professionals use Silverfin to help and advise more than 400.000 businesses. Our customers adore us! The even better news is there’s still plenty left to work on, and that’s where we hope you come in.

Since November 2023 we are proudly part of Visma - the European leader in mission-critical cloud software, enjoying the power of the Visma brand and resources whilst retaining business autonomy and go-to-market freedom.

What’s Team Syncs?

One of the cornerstones of the Silverfin platform is the integration with bookkeeping software that accountants already work with, which allows us to seamlessly import their accounting data. We currently have integrations with over 30 different vendors, and we want to add more as we expand to different markets.

Team Syncs is the team responsible for creating, maintaining and improving these integrations. Some APIs we need to use are poorly designed, badly documented or unreliable, and it can be challenging to build a robust integration. Yet solving those puzzles, and empowering our customers by importing gigabytes of data from their clunky bookkeeping software, makes it all worth it. Because once the data is in Silverfin, it's connected, standardised and can be easily worked with, which is what it's all about. If you're a tinkerer, love working with APIs and thrive in the face of uncertainty, this might be for you.

What are the things you'll be working on?

Improve the stability, performance and infrastructure cost of dozens of our current 3rd party integrations, through usage of different distributed systems patterns

Practise your modelling & refactoring skills. You'll have the opportunity to think about solutions applied in implementations of almost 50 of our integrations

Help design & build the new generic API based on more than a decade of our experience with building custom solutions for bookkeeping software

Rare opportunity to work on a CLI/service application which is currently deployed on hundreds of our customers' servers

What does working at Silverfin look like?

There are seven engineering teams working together to deliver the best value for our customers. Several product teams, collaborating closely with product managers and product designers, are solving customer facing problems. The other, more platformy teams, own complex subsystems, like syncs or AI, and or support the product teams with knowledge, frameworks and services.

Our ops team ensures things run smoothly, deploys happen correctly, and will work with you when issues should arise. We’re enthusiastic followers of the devops mindset, which means ops and developers work together to solve problems, and empower each-other to be self-sufficient, instead of throwing problems over the wall to the “other side”.

We run an up-to-date Rails monolith on the backend, with PostgreSQL and Redis for persistence and caching, and everything is running on a Kubernetes cluster in Google Cloud. Our daily tools include GitLab, Quip and Slack, with Google Meet as our remote conferencing tool of choice.

No code gets deployed without a code-review by a peer and testing is a must. Our pipeline automates deployment when the suite is green, and deploys happen dozens of times a day. Each team is currently doing Kanban, but they’re free to follow whatever process suits them best. There are regular retros held to work towards continuous improvement.

Software for accountants is not considered to be very exciting, but we have our fair share of technical challenges. To give you a sense of scale: our database exceeds 10TB*, and our largest table has crossed the 10 billion row mark a long while back. We interface with more than 30 different external APIs, and provide third parties an API of our own.

*: Our ops team noted that this actually isn’t that hard to achieve if you’re just indexing everything, but it still sounds impressive, right?

What makes the engineering team at Silverfin special?

We’re a remote-first engineering team of 35 people distributed in 14 different countries over two continents. A priority for us is maintaining proper work-life balance. We avoid meetings as much as possible, accept deadlines only when absolutely necessary, and never expect anyone to work longer hours than they’ve signed up for. A day in our working lives is pretty boring, and we feel that’s exactly how it should be.

Working with us means you can be flexible with your schedule. It’s OK to disappear for a few hours in the middle of the day to run some errands, get a haircut, pick up the kids - whatever reason, you don’t need to explain yourself. You also fully decide when you take time off: our team is sufficiently varied and well organised that there are always enough people around to handle the load, and in the rare cases it’s not, we will decrease the load instead of asking people to move their holiday.

Being r...