(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.

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 mln users worldwide (Germany, US, the Netherlands)

The 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 (primary programming language for this role)
• Kubernetes
• Redis
• Postgres
• Rails, Sinatra
• Golang
• Kafka
• GraphQL
• Google Cloud

Responsibilities:

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

As a (Senior) back-end Engineer (Ruby) at Blendle, you will be part of a small team responsible for the evolution and backlog of all our platforms.

Your qualification

• 5+ years experience developing backend systems (e.g. the likes of Ruby, Python, Java, Golang, Elixir, C#, PHP, Rust)
• 2+ years of writing Ruby production code
• Experienece in Devops and Kubernetes
• Experience with RESTful API design and/or GraphQL A
• background in refactoring large-scale systems
• Deep knowledge of testing principles
• Strong English communication skills
• Knowledge SOLID principles and software design principles
• Ability and passionate about mentoring & coaching other developers

What we offer

• A full-time job (40 hours that you’re free to plan into your week however you’d like)
• A competitive salary
• Full travel reimbursement
• A MacBook (or a windows laptop if you prefer)
• Freedom to work anywhere, everywhere
• Free and delicious lunches
• Free weekly massages
• Unlimited holidays
• Awesome and ambitious teams that share the same passion: to make journalism accessible and help people make better choices
• An ideal location in Utrecht, the heart of the Netherlands, at a 3-minute walk from the central station
• Very generous parental / birth leave

Additional details

Why Blendle?

1. Blendle fulfils an important task - Journalism is a vital component of any society, but newspapers and magazines see their revenues drop. Therefore, Blendle offers a new revenue stream which will help ensure the continuity of great journalism.
2. Blendle is making people happy - Because they can now easily access brilliant articles, without having to get a subscription to every single publication. We find it awesome to build a product that’s used by 1,000,000 people at this stage, which will hopefully be used by even more people soon.
3. Freedom - We believe that you know best how to unlock your full potential, and don’t need any rules for that. Roland for example kicks off his day on an idyllic balcony in Rotterdam with his laptop on his lap, and Jean likes to work at night, talking to himself in our chat program whilst coding.
4. 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.