About Rare Days

We're a full-service digital product agency. We build businesses at theintersection of content and commerce, and since 2020, we've been focused onthe creator economy and online education space.

We're a distributed team based in Canada. For this project specifically, a good part of the client team is based in Europe, so we're looking for candidates in EST or compatible timezones (anywhere from Eastern North America through Western/Central Europe) with strong overlap to a EST/CET working day.

This is a temporary contract role. Anticipated start date is as soon as possible.

About the project

You'll be joining a major build for one of our clients, a leading platform in thecreator economy. They're rolling out a native Community feature that gives theirusers' most engaged audiences a place to gather, talk, and come back betweensends, unlocking a premium upsell and stronger retention for the platform.

The project is mid-development by the time you start, with a beta window and arelease event planned for later this year. You'll be embedded into a small, focusedteam (three Rare Days engineering leads currently working on it, plus the client'sinternal engineers and product manager) and shipping production code from dayone.

About the role

We're looking for a senior full-stack engineer comfortable working primarily in Ruby on Rails and React, who can drop into an existing codebase, ramp upquickly, and start delivering meaningful tickets within the first few weeks. You'llwork alongside our existing engineering leads on this engagement, share planningand working sessions with the broader client team, and contribute directly tofeatures being shipped to end users.

The stack is Ruby on Rails with Postgres and Redis (Docker for local dev), a Reactfrontend, with real-time and feed infrastructure powered by Stream.io. We useGitHub for code management and Linear for ticketing.

This role is hands-on. There's no Rare Days PM on this engagement (the clientowns PM), so we're looking for someone who is self-directed, communicatesclearly, and can operate effectively inside a client's processes and rituals.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship full-stack features across the Rails service layer and the Reactfrontend on the client's community platform
• Pick up tickets from the Linear board, scope your own work, and deliverproduction-quality code with strong test coverage
• Participate in the client's sprint rituals, demos, and touchpoints, speakingconfidently about technical decisions, trade-offs, and delivery status
• Collaborate closely with the existing Rare Days engineers on the project (yourprimary pair during ramp-up) and with the client's internal engineers and PM
• Help drive the team toward upcoming beta and release milestones, flaggingrisks early and proposing solutions, not just problems
• Contribute to architecture and integration discussions where relevant (e.g.real-time infrastructure, feed/messaging via Stream, performance and scalingquestions)
• Write code reviews that raise the bar without slowing the team down

What we're looking for

• 7+ years of full-stack engineering experience, with substantial productionwork in Ruby on Rails and React
• Comfortable in a Rails monolith of meaningful size. You can navigate anunfamiliar codebase, find the patterns, and make changes that match theexisting conventions rather than fighting them
• Strong with Postgres (writing efficient queries, understanding indexing,reasoning about migrations on a live database) and familiar with Redis in a caching or background-job context
• Experience working with React in a production app (component patterns, statemanagement, integrating with a Rails backend)
• You've worked on apps where real-time features, multi-tenancy, or scale arereal concerns, and you have opinions about the trade-offs (familiarity withActionCable/AnyCable, Stream.io, Pusher, or similar is a plus)
• You can communicate effectively with both technical and non-technicalaudiences, and you're comfortable presenting your work directly to a clientteam
• You're self-directed: you can pick up a ticket, ask the right clarifyingquestions, and ship it without needing constant check-ins
• You're motivated by feedback and care about the craft. You'd rather raise aconcern early than ship something you're not proud of
• Available to work in an EST or compatible timezone (Eastern North Americathrough Western/Central Europe), with strong overlap to a EST/CET workingday for sprint rituals, pairing, and client touchpoints
• Comfortable working as a contractor

Nice to have

• Prior experience on creator-economy, publishing, or community products
• Background working as an embedded contractor inside a client's engineeringteam
• Familiarity with deploying Rails applications at scale (Heroku, AWS, or similar)
• Experience integrating with third-party real-time / feed / chat services

Engagement details

Type: Temporary contract, full-time allocation

Location: Remote, EST or compatible timezone (Eastern North Americathrough Western/Central Europe)