Senior Ruby Backend Engineer with affinity for observability (d/w/m)

Hypofriend has helped thousands of customers navigate the difficult journey of buying a home. Our online platform helps customers from calculating their affordability to getting matched to relevant properties to calculating and processing the optimal mortgage.

As a Senior Backend Engineer with an affinity for observability, you would be supporting both a customer-facing and an advisor-facing product that run on Vue.js, GraphQL, and Ruby on Rails, powered by AWS. Our customer-facing products include complex calculators wrapped in a simple UI, with a powerful calculation engine that takes thousands of mortgage products and optimizes them for our customers.

Our advisor-facing products include a fully-fledged back-office that ensures customer interactions over email, chat, and telephone — as well as the processing and handling of mortgage applications and financial documents — are reliable, efficient, and secure.

You'll help ensure our calculation engines, back-office tools, and customer-facing platform become more resilient and secure as we grow.

## Tasks

💪🏽 Individuals who like getting things done

💬 Excellent communication skills, able to work closely with backend engineers and product teams

🔍 Eagerness to understand the systems end-to-end, from application code to the infrastructure it runs on

🔧 Someone who is as comfortable writing infrastructure-as-code as they are debugging a production incident

📈 A pragmatic approach to reliability — building the right amount of resilience, focussing on the key building blocks and clean architecture

**Our technology stack**

⚙️ **Backend**

• Ruby 4.0 (Rails 8.1)
• PostgreSQL 16
• Serverless Ruby, Node.JS, Python

🖌️ **Frontend**

• Vue.js 3
• CSS3 (flex & friends)

👷🏽 **Infrastructure**

• AWS: ECS, Lambda, RDS, CloudFront
• Terraform for infrastructure-as-code
• CI/CD pipelines

🔍 **Testing & Reliability**

• RSpec
• Monitoring & alerting tooling

## Requirements

• Strong commercial experience with **Ruby** (min 4-5 years), ideally including **Ruby on Rails 7/8**
• **RSpec** experience
• Good grasp of **OO patterns**
• **Sentry**, **GitHub** and **Datadog** are your best friends
• Hands-on production experience with **Terraform** for infrastructure-as-code
• Working knowledge of **AWS** (ECS, Lambda, RDS, CloudFront, VPC networking, IAM)
• Experience building and maintaining **CI/CD pipelines**
• Solid understanding of **observability**: monitoring, logging, and alerting
• Experience with **containerization** (Docker, ECS or Kubernetes)
• Comfort with **incident response**: on-call rotations, postmortems, and root-cause analysis
• Good grasp of **RDBMS** operations (**PostgreSQL 16+**) — backups, performance tuning, failover
• A security-first mindset: familiarity with secrets management, least-privilege access, and cloud security best practices

**Nice to have**

• Experience with **serverless Ruby, Node.JS** architectures
• Familiarity with **GitHub Actions**
• Experience defining and tracking **SLIs/SLOs/error budgets**
• Scripting/automation experience beyond Ruby (Bash, Python)
• Prior experience in a regulated industry (fintech, proptech, or similar)

## Benefits

**What can Hypofriend offer you?**

👪 A young, motivated, and interdisciplinary team with years of experience building successful digital products

🏠 Work up to 100% from home, with occasional meetings and off-sites near our Berlin Headquarters

💥 In addition to an attractive fixed salary, you get the exciting opportunity to improve the German mortgage industry and be at the forefront of new and innovative practices

📈 Stock options in a growing company

💰 An 1,500 annual euro Learning budget

💼 As a young and rapidly growing company you have an excellent career perspective

💻 Latest Macbook and equipment to work from home

🏃🏼‍♂️ Urban Sports Membership

📍 A unique 3-story office at Rosenthaler Platz

🏡 Full support to become a homeowner