(Senior) Backend Engineer (Ruby)

About Blendle

Blendle is the biggest platform of premium journalism in the Netherlands.

Blendle is basically an iTunes for Dutch newspapers, an app and a website where readers can buy articles.

Blendle fulfils an important task Journalism is a vital component of any society, but even the greatest newspapers and magazines continuously show a decrease in sales. Blendle offers a new revenue stream which will help ensure the continuity of great journalism.

Official website

Position

With a small group of almost 90 people, we're building Blendle. Our ultimate goal is to provide a seamless and fantastic user experience for journalism. We believe a combination of stories that change your perspective on what's going on and butter-smooth apps will help people to look at the world differently. At the moment we have around 1,5 mln users worldwide (Germany, US, the Netherlands)

A second goal is to build an organization that helps people grow in their skills. This is why we spend a ton of time on coaching and feedback within Blendle. We'll help you set audacious goals and grow new skills.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of the challenges we work on, and how we approach them:

• Best reading experience - We continuously work to improve the reading experience in our clients. Each article is presented in the publishers own signature style, down to the smallest details. When a user opens an article, we apply a style document to the text of the article—defining every detail from the fonts used in the byline to the line-height for the kicker. It is imperative to the quality of the user experience that this does not lead to any noticeable delays when opening an article. We had to work hard on optimizing code for the parsing pipeline, rendering the text and calculating the layout of the article to keep everything running at 60 FPS.
• Blendle Audio - We worked very hard to build the best listening experience for our users. The audio content is dynamically generated to surprise each user with a personalized greeting in the introduction. The backend provides us with a set of audio segments that form the intro, we stitch the segments together locally. We put a lot of effort into creating a smooth user experience for audio, we allow the user to control the audio in a lot of different ways that are all fluid and intuitive.

The technical stack/tooling we currently work with include:

• Ruby 
• Kubernetes
• Postgres
• Rails, Sinatra
• Golang
• Redis
• Kafka
• Google Cloud
• GraphQL

A typical day could involve:

• Collaborate with the Product Manager to translate the functional requirements for a feature into a technical design
• Design the schema for a new feature in our GraphQL API together a mobile developer 
• Tracking down bug reports from our users, working on a fix, and deploying it to production
• Coming up with systematic solutions to problems instead of focusing on one-off fixes
• Discussing technical challenges with your team
• Mentioning relevant trade-offs and coming to a final conclusion with the team
• Pairing on a feature with a colleague
• Applying the “boy scout rule” to leave things in a better state than they were
• Delivering your implementation with good test coverage (preferably test-driven)
• Refactoring existing services
• Asking your peers for reviews and collaborating until you’ve hit the preferred quality
• Having CI deploy your changes to our Kubernetes cluster automatically
• Reviewing a pull-request that a member of your team has opened
• Taking part in the scrum process

A (Senior) Back End Engineer (Ruby) will be part of a small team responsible for the evolution and backlog of all our platforms. 

Your qualification

• 5+ years experience developing back end systems (e.g. the likes of Ruby, Python, Java, Golang, C#, Elixir, PHP, Rust)
• 2+ years of writing Ruby production code
• Experience with RESTful API design and/or GraphQL
• A background in refactoring large-scale systems
• Strong knowledge of testing principles
• Strong English communication skills both written and verbal
• Knowledge SOLID principles and software design principles
• Ability and passionate about mentoring & coaching other developers; Able to leave your ego at the door

Additional details

Why Blendle?

1. Blendle fulfils an important task - Journalism is a vital component of any society, but newspapers and magazines continuously show a decrease in sales. Therefore, Blendle offers a new revenue stream which will help ensure the continuity of great journalism.
2. People pay us because we spend so much time on crafting a better user experience for reading and listening. The product you get to spend your time on building is enjoyed by over 1 million users worldwide.
3. A fun team - Blendle employs nearly 90 people now, and the atmosphere is great.
4. Freedom - We believe that you are the best person to decide when and where you work. Huibert starts his day with a run and by opening his laptop in his garden in The Hague and Jean regularly spends the night talking to himself in our chat program whilst coding.
5. Freebies - On top of a monthly donation to your bank account, we take good care of you in the office. Every day, lunch is prepared with love, and we’re happy to fix dinner and weekly free massages. Don’t live in Utrecht? Then we’ll cover the expenses for the thing that gets you here: either public transport, or your dear electric/fuel-sipping car.