Engineer II, Platform
Description
About the Role
We are seeking an experienced Engineer II, Platform (Ruby on Rails) to partner with our Platform Team in driving the stability, reliability, scalability, and security of Kantata’s core Rails applications.
Key Responsibilities
Developer Tooling and Support: Build, maintain, and improve internal tools and third-party integrations to support developer velocity and operational safety. Example initiatives may include:
Adding new features to the internal employee admin portals.
Developing custom tooling or evaluating vendor solutions to help feature teams execute database migrations more safely.
Updating Rails and React code to implement database performance enhancements recommended by our DBA.
Safely testing, validating, and rolling our major infrastructure and codebase shifts, alongside Platform and Feature Teams
Building telemetry and cost dashboards to monitor infrastructure performance and cloud spend.
Observability: Expand application observability (metrics, structured logs, and distributed traces) to improve system visibility and performance tracking using OpenTelemetry. Example initiatives may include:
Extending and maintaining custom OpenTelemetry wrapper libraries to support new application tracing features.
Building observability dashboards and alerts to monitor, manage, and prevent excessive telemetry data volumes.
Application Health & Maintenance: Proactively own the day-to-day health, security, and stability of customer-facing Rails applications. Example initiatives may include:
Eliminating technical debt by replacing legacy code.
Address security vulnerabilities by updating Ruby gems and npm packages.
Participating in on-call rotations and supporting occasional scheduled weekend maintenance windows.
Qualifications & Experience
Senior-Level Experience: 5+ years of software engineering experience, with deep hands-on expertise of Ruby on Rails in production environments.
Systems Maintenance & Modernization: Proven track record of executing complex, zero-downtime upgrades, refactoring legacy codebases, and safely rolling out major platform changes without customer impact.
Observability Expertise: Deep experience configuring APM, distributed tracing, structured logging, and actionable alerting metrics using modern telemetry frameworks (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Cloudwatch, Prometheus).
Ecosystem Knowledge: Strong technical foundation in background worker systems (Delayed Job, Resque, Sidekiq), relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL), Redis, and modern frontend asset pipelines (esbuild, Vite, Webpack).
Cross-Functional Communication & Autonomy: Proven ability to work independently while collaborating cross-functionally—documenting technical standards and serving as a bridge between infrastructure specialists, DBAs, and feature engineering teams.
Nice-to-Haves
Cloud Infrastructure (AWS): Production experience with core AWS services (ECS/EKS, RDS, Redshift, S3, ElastiCache, SQS/SNS) supporting containerized Web applications.
Deployment Pipelines (CI/CD): Production experience accelerating deployment pipelines (GitHub Actions, Dockerfiles), cutting CI/CD build times, and contributing to infrastructure-as-code configuration tied to the Rails application layer.
Alternative Data Stores: Production experience working with non-relational or multi-model databases (e.g., document stores like MongoDB, graph databases like SurrealDB).
Local AI Runtimes: Exposure to containerized local AI tooling (e.g., Ollama or similar open-source LLM runtimes) for prototyping, testing, or integrating self-hosted models.