Senior Developer (Ruby)
at Oyster
Remote
One platform, a whole world of opportunity
Right now, the best jobs are limited to people in a handful of the world’s wealthiest cities, yet brilliant people are everywhere. Driven to overturn the status quo and distribute opportunities equally around the world, Oyster launched its global employment platform to help companies hire, pay, and care for talent anywhere.
When it comes to global employment, we walk the walk. We’re proof that companies don’t need an office to create a highly-engaged culture. Since the company’s inception in January 2020, Oyster has:
Created a fully-distributed, vibrant team of 500+ employees across 60+ countries
Established a diverse leadership team and an employee base that’s 60% female
Achieved one of the highest employee engagement scores in its class
Raised $150 million in Series C funding at a valuation of over $1 billion!
Our momentum speaks to the power of global employment—and we’re just getting started! If you want to change the world with Oyster and be empowered to work remotely while doing so, we’d love for you to apply!
The Role
Location: Anywhere within timezones GMT-8 to GMT+3. All of Oyster’s positions are fully remote and you can work from home, forever.
Delivering projects to empower companies and remote workers
- You will own the delivery of user stories. You’ll be writing code, tests, and debugging issues. You’ll apply high standards of code quality and development best practices, such as TDD or continuous integration, and secure code thinking.
- You’ll play an important role in our delivery process. It will be important to understand the product goals and then provide technical input to specification. You’ll participate in discussions on domain model design and coordinate with the Product Owner on acceptance criteria. And you’ll collaborate with lead developers on architecture and implementation planning.
Be a key part of our development team
- We’re a young team, you’ll help shape our team’s process and help us make technical decisions to make us effective and a great place to work as a developer.
- We also expect you to support developers by answering questions and offering support when needed, or to pair on complex problems.
- And to advance technical excellence at Oyster by researching new tools and practices, taking initiative on technical improvements and refactorings, and moving best practice forward through pairing, discussions in the team.
What we’re looking for
We’d like to see:
- At least 5 years of experience as a software developer. We are hiring for several different levels and will offer you the one that matches best the feedback we get from the hiring process.
- Expert use of a high-level language such as Ruby, Python, Elixir, and experience using Javascript.
- Having been a Senior contributor for large, complex software projects.
On the technical side, we’re looking for:
- SQL database usage and schema design
- API implementation and design
Other attributes that are important
- You thrive working in a team and being supportive of others.
- You’re persistent and get things done.
- You’re a learner: committed to learning and helping the development team to progress.
What you’ll be working on
You’ll be a member of one of our product teams, working on:
- Hiring automation. Hiring a team member cross-border should be quick and frictionless, but there are too many barriers to that today. Our teams on hiring automation create processes that integrate structured knowledge on hiring from dozens of countries into a seamless experience.
- HR tools for distributed teams. Companies are more and more building global, distributed teams, and they’ll need the tools to enable them to work effectively.
- Payroll and payments. We run complex payroll jobs that combine accounting information from over eighty countries, as well as collecting payments and disbursing millions of dollars of salary to employees every month.
- Enterprise platform features. Our customers demand high quality security, access, communication, and auditing features.
- Growth teams. We are growing quickly and have teams devoted to experimenting in growth hacking.
Engineering at Oyster
At Oyster, we are on a mission to create a more equal world by making it possible for companies everywhere to hire people anywhere. The Engineering team is responsible for building up the platform, tooling, automation, and experience to help Oyster achieve this mission. Together with Product and Design, we partner closely with subject matter experts in Finance, Legal, Workplace, and more to build and refine our offerings to make a single product that is a pleasure to work with. We’re breaking new ground in the hiring market and have a wealth of interesting challenges to tackle!
We seek out and build up engineers and leaders who have strong software engineering fundamentals, value transparency, promote knowledge sharing, and thrive in a distributed, remote-first, and asynchronous working environment.
Finally, we live and champion our company values.
- We elevate talent: We hire our team (using our own product!) and continue to grow their abilities through mentorship, challenges that stretch and strengthen their skills, and giving them room to explore.
- We build trust: We are transparent and promote an active flow of information throughout the team. We believe that people can do their best work when they feel supported, heard, and safe to challenge ideas to make the product, and team or company stronger. To do that we value egoless sharing of information, transparency throughout the company, actively promote knowledge sharing, and promote a safe environment to try and fail. Failures are not the end; they are moments to learn and grow!
- We thrive together: By building upon our first two values, we promote teamwork and collaboration to come together a globally-minded, remote-first company that values collective wins over individual wins.
Working in our teams
- We have have seven development teams totalling about forty developers, ten designers, and fifteen in product. We’re growing fast.
- We use Agile development processes. Our teams are allowed to decide on processes that work for them, but all are expected to have daily check-ins (sync or async), and regular retrospectives. Some teams use pure kanban, others fortnightly development cycles.
- Our current technology stack includes Ruby, Rails, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, React, GraphQL, and we deploy to Heroku.
- You’ll receive a new M1 or M1 Pro laptop to work on, and have a stipend to equip your home office with whatever else you need to be productive at home.
How we work together at Oyster
- Our values guide the work we do, the decisions we make, and the culture that makes us special. We elevate talent. We build trust. We thrive together.
- Our mission is to create a more equal world—one global hire at a time. Everything we do ladders up to our mission—and that doesn’t just mean building software. We develop programs, participate in workshops, and create dedicated teams to ensure we successfully support companies and knowledge workers in this new world of work.
- We embrace asynchronous communication and collaborative work—and we share how we work in the Oyster Public HQ —to help other global teams learn from our experiences.
How YOU work
Different countries have different statutory benefits, different cultures have different norms, and different people have different needs! In order to best support and encourage our diverse team, we’ve created How YOU Work; a program of policies, practices, and perks to support your whole human experience as an employee at Oyster.
- Work from anywhere: Oyster is a borderless, HQ-less company. As long as your work gets done on time, your team has the support they need, and you’re authorized to work where you live, the world is truly your Oyster.
- Paid time off: We’re all about taking breaks—we all need it. Oyster provides employees with 40 days off each year, which includes public/bank holidays and vacation/holiday leave (unless your country mandates more).
- Mental health support: We consider your mental health a top priority. We offer access to Plumm, a mental well-being service, to support your mental health.
- Wellbeing allowance: Each month, Oyster will top up your Juno wallet with a wellbeing allowance. Juno Points can be applied to anything that helps you show up to work as your best self, whether that’s your internet bill, a class, gym membership, or houseplants. The choices are endless!
- Flexible parental leave: Families are created in lots of different ways. Our parental leave policy applies to all employees who are becoming parents, regardless of how they become a parent. Oysters are eligible for a minimum of three months of paid parental leave and your job will be held for 12 months (or longer if required by local jurisdiction).
- WFH stipend: We give you a laptop and $1500 for equipment so you can have your remote office up and running in no time. Check out Equipment at Oyster for more details.
The best jobs should be available to everyone
At Oyster, we celebrate a variety of perspectives and experiences and we’ve intentionally built our product and our company with an inclusive, global mindset. We know from experience that people from underrepresented groups often don’t apply for roles they don’t feel they meet all the criteria for. We’re committed to elevating talent by creating a trust-based 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.
Oyster is committed to ensuring equal opportunity of employment for qualified persons with disabilities and actively fosters an inclusive work environment. Please email jobs@oysterhr.com with the subject line: Interview Accommodations if you require any reasonable accommodations throughout the recruiting process.