Job description
Location: Remote, mainly UK based, as travel to our London hub will be required once a month.
As Ably enters its next stage of growth, we’re looking for talented and curious engineers to help us build and deliver the platform to power synchronized digital experiences in realtime for one billion devices every month by 2023.
Our everyday digital experiences are in the midst of a realtime revolution. Consumers expect realtime digital experiences as standard and synchronized data in realtime is business critical for many organisations. Yet, at the same time, organizations don’t have the in-house capabilities nor the time to do this efficiently at scale. That’s where Ably comes in.
We provide a suite of APIs to build, extend, and deliver powerful digital experiences in realtime for more than 250 million devices across 80 countries each month. Organizations like Toyota, Bloomberg, HubSpot, and Hopin depend on Ably’s platform to offload the growing complexity of business-critical realtime data synchronization at global scale.
But we can’t rest yet. And we’d like your help.
To see what life’s like at Ably, check out our careers page at ably.com/careers and read the story of how Ably's core values came to be.
What we do
Ably’s engineering team is deeply technical, collectively bringing a wealth of experience and broad technology skills across infrastructure, security, distributed systems, and much more. The calibre of the code we produce is what excites and motivates us each day. If you enjoy solving hard distributed system problems that are mostly platform agnostic and theoretical in nature, then you'll love working at Ably.
Requirements
Ably is an engineering company at its heart. Our audience ranges from software engineers to CIOs and it’s our job to make sure the world knows about Ably.
You will be responsible for hands-on development and assisting the web engineering team to deliver our website, developer dashboards, and the next generation of front ends that our customers, developers like yourself, depend on.
Day to day, you will:
- Have a standup with your team to help everyone stay synchronized
- Work closely with your team members to deliver features, asynchronously and remote pairing
- Performing code reviews on pull requests to help the team ship quality software
- Work with people from across the business to develop features that are valuable to ourselves and our clients
- Identify room for improvement, in our process and our code
- Consider the big picture, and help ensure that our day to day work constantly moves us towards our longer term goals
It would be great if you have:
- Ruby. Two years professional experience using Ruby.
- Rails and web development. Two years professional experience with Rails development. Your focus will primarily be on the frontend, building both vanilla Rails views as well as ones augmented by frameworks.
- Strong HTML, CSS and Javascript. Some knowledge of modern standards (ES6+, CSS Grids, Fetch), best practices (Accessibility, SEO, Performance, Security), frameworks (React, Gatsby, Angular, or ViewComponent), bundling (Webpack) and modern approaches to CSS (Styled Components, TailwindCSS). Deep experience in a few of the aforementioned concepts and technologies is a requirement.
- Architecting frontends. Experience with designing and implementing frontend architectures, like component libraries, SPA’s, and server-side rendered applications.
- Full-stack mindset. You’ve built full-stack applications with CI/CD, as well as understand and promote the importance of the latter.
- Testing strategies. You must have experience with writing automated tests for software with tools like Jest or Cypress.
- Component libraries. Experience building and/or working with a component library.
- Cross-functional team experience. You worked closely with designers and product managers in short, effective feedback loops.
- Good grasp of Agile, Kanban and SCRUM. Working with stakeholders to create and manage backlogs, working with the team to manage the delivery of work
It would be nice if you have:
- Experience delivering developer-focussed frontends
- Knowledge of realtime, event-driven and streaming protocols
- An interest in functional programming with Elm or ClojureScript
- Experience with mentoring less experienced developers
What’s it like to work at Ably?
Ably is entering a new phase of growth led by an experienced senior team. You’ll be part of a successful, highly motivated, and extremely collaborative team.
To provide the infrastructure required for the next generation of the internet, to tell the world about it, and to support everyone inside Ably to do so we hire people who are ready and capable of taking on challenging problems in a high-growth environment.
We want to work in a company of inclusive people who treat each other well. To really thrive at Ably, you’ll need to believe in and be prepared to do your work in line with our values, which are:
- Open for all. Open is a mindset. When open, we’re better collaborators, communicators and creators. Whether open source, standards, or protocols, open hearts, minds, and eyes. It’s better when it’s open.
- Bias for action. We avoid analysis paralysis at all costs. We lean into doing in order to move us forward. When we have enough of what we need to act, we act.
- Even the best do better. We want to be the best - but that doesn’t mean we rest when we are. Improvement and growth - true betterment - is an ongoing journey. One fuelled by curiosity and taking risks.
- Technology needs humanity. Our technology means little without people - whether that’s how we treat our colleagues, or how we design developer experiences. Being human matters.
- Dependable people make dependable things. Dependability is integral to our mission and technology, but being dependable starts with our people. When we care enough to take real ownership of our products and problems - all else will follow.
- Bold creativity leads to the greatest rewards. When viewed through a different lens, what stands in the way can become the way. The bigger the challenge the easier the choice: bold creativity will always move us forward, create better outcomes, and set us apart.
What’s in it for you?
- A good, competitive salary
- A great company culture
- Share options
- The chance to learn and grow with a fast-moving company, supported by a learning budget of £1,000 that gives you access to professional training, events, conferences, workshops etc.
- Remote first: Unless you want to pop into our communal office space in Shoreditch, London, you'll work from home most of the time, apart from when we have planning sessions and Summits
- Your choice of high quality tech kit to work on
- Home workstation set up budget of £500, plus an annual top-up of £250
- Regular company away days and social events
- Friday need-to-know drinks and snacks
- Private health insurance, including Doctor@Hand
- Access to private and confidential coaching via Sanctus
- 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme
- A monthly wellbeing budget with Juno
- Enhanced parental leave
- 25 days of paid annual leave (33 days including bank holidays)
- 10 days of paid sick leave (including mental health days) per year
- Dog friendly office for when you’re in the office!
If you enjoy working as part of a technology company, value open source, and love solving hard problems - then we’d love to hear from you, regardless of whether you fit the job description exactly or not. If in doubt, drop us an email; we’d be more than happy to give you some advice on your application.
