Hire Remote Ruby on Rails Developers

Hire Senior Ruby on Rails Developers Who Ship Product Fast

Rails is the framework that launched Shopify, GitHub, Airbnb, Stripe, Basecamp, and Twitch. It’s the fastest way to go from idea to production-grade web application — when you have engineers who know how to use it right. The magic of Rails is convention over configuration; the risk is that teams who don’t understand those conventions build systems that collapse under their own weight.

We staff Rails engineers who know the conventions cold and know when to break them. Our Ruby on Rails developers have built the high-growth SaaS platforms, marketplace engines, and B2B APIs that venture-backed startups scaled to Series B and beyond — in your time zone, in English, at 50% of US market rates.

What Our Rails Developers Build

SaaS Web Applications

Multi-tenant SaaS platforms with subscription billing (Stripe), role-based access control, team management, and the internal admin tooling that operations teams live in. Our Rails engineers build the application core that your product is built on — and they build it to last.

Marketplaces & Two-Sided Platforms

Marketplace platforms with complex matching logic, payment splitting, escrow, seller verification, and real-time messaging. Rails’ ActiveRecord and Action Cable make two-sided marketplace development fast and maintainable — when the engineers know what they’re doing.

REST & GraphQL APIs

API-only Rails applications serving React front-ends and mobile clients. Our Rails engineers build versioned, documented APIs with proper authentication (Devise, JWT, OAuth), rate limiting, and caching — designed to be consumed by multiple client types without tight coupling.

Background Jobs & Async Processing

Sidekiq, Delayed Job, and Active Job — our Rails engineers build reliable async processing pipelines for email delivery, webhook processing, PDF generation, and data-intensive background tasks that shouldn’t block the request cycle.

Performance Optimization & Scaling

N+1 query elimination, database indexing strategies, fragment caching, Redis-backed session stores, CDN integration, and horizontal scaling with Puma. Our Rails engineers fix the performance issues that slow down Rails apps at scale — and prevent them from recurring.

Ruby on Rails Technology Stack

Framework: Ruby on Rails 6.x, 7.x, 8.x

Background Jobs: Sidekiq, Delayed Job, Active Job, Resque

Real-Time: ActionCable (WebSockets), Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus)

Authentication: Devise, OmniAuth, JWT, OAuth 2.0

Payment: Stripe, Braintree, PayPal

Testing: RSpec, Minitest, FactoryBot, Capybara, VCR

Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch

Search: Elasticsearch, Meilisearch, pg_search, Ransack

Cloud: Heroku, AWS (ECS, RDS, ElastiCache), GCP, Fly.io, Render

Front-End Integration: React + Rails API, Hotwire/Turbo, ViewComponent

Client Success Story: EdTech Platform Acquisition — Rails at the Core

An EdTech startup building science education software chose Ruby on Rails for its ability to let a small team move fast without sacrificing maintainability. Our Rails engineers joined at Series A, owned backend development, and built the features — live session scheduling, student progress tracking, instructor payment management, and a content authoring system — that grew the platform from 50,000 to over 800,000 students. The business was subsequently acquired by a major education publishing group. The acquirer’s technical team specifically noted the quality and test coverage of the Rails codebase as a reason the integration timeline could be aggressive — a compliment that speaks directly to the quality of the engineering.

Client Success Story: Legacy Fintech Rails System Rescue and Stabilization

A fintech startup operating a customer-facing financial product on Rails 4 was experiencing two to three production incidents per week from a codebase with zero test coverage, outdated dependencies, and deployments that required manual intervention. Investor confidence was eroding. Our Rails engineers embedded with a stabilization-first mandate: built comprehensive test coverage reaching 71% in twelve weeks, upgraded the application from Rails 4 to Rails 7 without disrupting production, and replaced manual deployments with an automated GitHub Actions pipeline. The weekly incidents stopped within the first month. The company raised a Series B six months later, with engineering stability cited as a key factor in renewed investor confidence.

Why Companies Choose Our Rails Developers

• Convention mastery: Our Rails engineers know Rails conventions so deeply that they follow them by instinct — which means faster development, less bike-shedding, and codebases that any Rails developer can navigate
• Test-driven by default: RSpec with FactoryBot, Capybara for integration tests, and VCR for external API mocking — our engineers ship features with the test coverage that makes confident refactoring possible
• Performance discipline: They catch N+1 queries in code review, not in production, and build caching strategies that prevent performance cliffs as data grows
• Hotwire/Turbo fluency: For teams that want interactive UIs without the complexity of a separate React application, our engineers build with Hotwire and Turbo — Rails’ modern answer to JavaScript-heavy front-ends
• 50% cost savings: Fully-burdened rates including salary, benefits, taxes, and HR

Engagement Models

• Individual Rails Engineer — A senior Rails developer embedded in your existing team. Ideal for adding a convention-fluent backend engineer to a startup shipping product fast, or a Rails stabilization specialist to a team dealing with performance or test coverage debt.
• Rails Product Pods (2–3 engineers) — A coordinated backend squad balancing feature delivery with codebase quality. Common for SaaS and marketplace companies that need to ship features while stabilizing existing code — the combination that rails teams at Series A and B typically need.
• Full Rails Teams (4–15+ engineers) — Complete Rails engineering organizations for high-growth SaaS platforms, B2B suite products, and marketplaces scaling toward Series B and beyond.
• Contract-to-Hire Rails Engineers — Evaluate a Rails engineer on your actual codebase — convention mastery and N+1 discipline show up clearly in the first few PRs.

How To Vet Rails Developers

Our Rails vetting identifies engineers who’ve internalized the conventions — and know exactly when to break them. The four-stage process:

1. Technical screening — Rails internals (Active Record query generation, the request/response lifecycle, Rack middleware, before_action performance implications), Sidekiq and queue management, testing discipline (RSpec, FactoryBot, Capybara, VCR), and Hotwire/Turbo fluency. Over 90% of applicants do not pass this stage.
2. Take-home exercise — Build a multi-model Rails feature: a controller with before_action authorization, an Eloquent — sorry, Active Record — query with eager loading, a Sidekiq background job, and an RSpec test suite covering the service layer and controller. Evaluated on N+1 discipline, test coverage, and Rails convention adherence.
3. Live technical interview — N+1 problem-solving from a real codebase, system design for a Rails SaaS feature (background job strategy, caching approach, service object vs. concern vs. model method), and discussion of when Rails conventions should be broken.
4. Communication screening — Rails engineers often work at fast-moving startups where communication across product, design, and engineering moves quickly. We assess async communication habits and how engineers handle ambiguous requirements.

What to Look for When Hiring Rails Developers

Senior Rails engineers have internalized the conventions so deeply that they follow them automatically — and they know exactly when the conventions would lead them astray.

What strong candidates demonstrate:

• They distinguish between includes, joins, preload, and eager_load without looking at the docs — because they’ve hit the performance difference in production and had to choose deliberately
• They have a clear opinion on when to use service objects, when to use concerns, and when to trust the model — candidates who reach for service objects on every feature may be over-engineering; candidates who put everything in models may be under-engineering
• They’ve worked with Sidekiq at scale: they understand retry semantics, idempotency requirements for background jobs, and how to tune concurrency without overwhelming the database connection pool
• They write RSpec with FactoryBot as a default practice — and they’ve designed test suites that run in under two minutes at meaningful coverage

Red flags to watch for:

• Not knowing how before_action affects controller throughput — or using it for business logic that belongs in a service object
• Unable to explain the Rack middleware stack — a sign they haven’t needed to debug request processing at a deeper level than Rails’ routing
• Over-engineering with service objects, interactors, and form objects on applications simple enough that standard Rails MVC would suffice
• No Hotwire/Turbo familiarity in 2024 — a Rails engineer who hasn’t evaluated Hotwire for interactive UI features may be defaulting to React even when it’s not needed

Interview questions that reveal real depth:

• “Explain the difference between includes, preload, and eager_load in Active Record. In what situation would you choose eager_load over includes?”
• “You’re adding a background job for sending email notifications at scale. Walk me through the idempotency design — what happens if Sidekiq retries the job after it partially executed?”
• “A Rails controller action is running slowly. Walk me through how you’d diagnose and fix it — what tools would you use and in what order?”

Related Services

• Enterprise Software Developers — Ruby on Rails alongside Java, Python, and Node.js on our full enterprise engineering bench.
• E-commerce Developers — Shopify is built on Rails. Our e-commerce engineers combine Rails expertise with deep commerce platform knowledge.
• DevOps & SRE Engineers — Pair your Rails team with infrastructure engineers who manage Heroku, AWS, and cloud operations.
• Staff Augmentation — The fastest way to add a senior Rails engineer to your existing team.

Want to Hire Remote Ruby on Rails Developers?

We specialize in sourcing, vetting, and placing senior remote Rails engineers — from individual developers who know the conventions cold and eliminate N+1 queries from day one, to complete Rails teams building high-growth SaaS platforms, marketplace engines, and B2B products from Series A to acquisition. We make it fast, affordable, and low-risk.

Get matched with Ruby on Rails developers →

Ready to hire Rails developers who understand Active Record internals, Sidekiq at scale, and when to break the conventions? Contact us today and we’ll introduce you to senior Rails engineers within 48 hours.