💎 Senior Rails Engineer

We help organizations practice Honest Security

Building software that secures and manages digital assets

While demonstrating empathy, respect, and care for what is most important – people

Empowering them to do the best work of their lives.

Background

Kolide is a VC-backed remote-first startup building device management and security software for fast-growing companies that value Honest Security. With hundreds of customers and a novel approach to solving security and compliance concerns, Kolide is poised to grow quickly over the next few years. To prepare, we are looking to responsibly develop our organization to help us meet our lofty goals while increasing our organization’s diverse set of skills and perspectives.

About The Job

While Kolide employs other programming languages for our endpoint agent—our Slack app, our device server, customer facing APIs, and customer-facing UI, are all proudly written in a single majestic monolithic Rails 7 codebase.

Rails engineers work on well-scoped problems assigned to them in Github and bring a feature or an improvement from conception all the way to production. While you’ll be working independently, you’ll never be alone and without help. When asked, your teammates will offer the help you need and collaborate with you at any stage of the process and in a manner that best suits your individual needs.

Most importantly, your time is your own. The entire company has two meetings each week, so we get some face time and stay aware of new customers and exciting development. That’s it.

As a Rails engineer, you will have an opportunity to make an impact on many aspects of Kolide’s product. Here is a selection of recent projects the team shipped:

• Build a frictionless end-user auth experience with signed links sent via Slack using Rails 6.1's signed IDs.
• Build a dependency map of UI components to underlying data sources so end-users can refresh any data-point in the UI at will in real-time.
• Create a distributed query queue system based in redis for fast and performant ad-hoc query scheduling on enrolled devices.
• Contribute progress bar support for POST requests in Hotwired/Turbo
• Upgrade all of our Stimulus JS controllers to use the version 3 value API.
• Improve our Google Workspace import synchronization so it completes successfully across organizations with over 100,000 employees.

Additionally, Kolide embraces the simplicity of server-side rendering and heavily leverages the new Hotwire library to add the reactivity of modern webapps. We don’t have any features that require React or similar frameworks.

Much of the Rails work involves processing, augmenting, and visualizing data that we receive from endpoints. As a result, you will be collaborating closely with endpoint engineers and if you wish, given opportunities to work on the endpoint agent code, which we proudly open source under the MIT License.

We love Rails and often are the first adopters of new libraries and frameworks in that ecosystem. As an early adopter of these technologies, you’ll have opportunities at Kolide to directly contribute to these open source projects in meaningful ways.

We rotate “on-call” responsibilities, meaning you will transition from focused work to reviewing PRs, assisting other engineers, helping our Customer Success team answer questions from customers, or assist our sales team with technical questions. It’s a great opportunity to get exposed to the most important parts of our business and stay in touch with customers and non-technical colleagues.

About You

We are looking for US based candidates who have at least 5 years experience building SaaS products in Ruby on Rails. You should be comfortable with engineering in the entire stack including writing HTML, CSS, Javascript, and a good understanding of HTTP.

You could be a self-taught high-school graduate, or you could hold a masters in Computer Science and Engineering. It doesn’t matter as long as you meet the criteria.

You have some affinity for security and IT. It’s even better if you’ve held an IT support or end-user facing security role. Much of our work involves taking complex security and endpoint concepts and distilling them down into words and visuals end-users can understand.

You should like writing, reading, and working with SQL. All of the queries we send to the endpoint are written in SQLite and understanding concepts like CTEs, casting, and aggregations, will help you decipher the more complex queries we send down to customer devices.

You are a good writer who can write prose with empathy and tolerance for less technical people. As a product that interacts directly with our customers' end-users via Slack, it helps when our engineers can contribute to the writing process.

You have experience building apps that scale. At Kolide, this means citing relevant prior experience when a fellow engineer’s pull request might be doing something dangerous like adding an index that might lock a table, or introducing a N+1 query in a high throughput request path. When things get slow in production, you know a few common places to look to understand where a bottleneck may be occurring.

We are a US based remote-first company. You can work anywhere you want in the US as long as your working hours maintain a 3 hour overlap with the US eastern time-zone.

Benefits Summary

🏖️ Open, unlimited vacation policy (plus 10 paid company holidays)

🕑 Flexible working hours

💰 Fully remote culture (with $2K stipend for office setup)

🏥 Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage (100% of monthly premiums covered, plus $500 towards deductibles)

👪 14-weeks parental leave 

🚴🏽‍♂️ Health and Wellness reimbursement ($300/month)

✈️️ One conference per year

📚 Education reimbursement ($500/year)

🏦 401(k) Retirement Plan

📱 Phone and internet stipend

🌼 Life insurance and long term disability

☀️ Summer Fridays: Half days from Memorial Day to Labor Day on Fridays

How To Apply

Please submit an application through this website. There is no hard deadline for the application process. 

Submit your resume through the link provided. Cover letters are welcome. The best applications include specific examples of things you’ve done in the past that translate well to the type of work you’ll do at Kolide.

If your application is well received, we’ll invite you to the interview stage, which will include (but is not limited to) a preliminary call, and 2-3 one-hour interviews with your future colleagues, and a final interview with the CEO. If you are applying for a technical role, we may have you complete a take home exercise. 

Kolide is committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals. As part of this commitment, Kolide will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, please contact Kate Gasparrini, Employee Success Manager at kate@kolide.co. 

The entire process may take up to three weeks, depending on team availability. We appreciate you considering Kolide and are excited to read your application. If you have questions or concerns, please reach out to jobs@kolide.co.