A shortlist typically within 72 hours, usually contributing inside two weeks, and 30-day replacement support if the fit is wrong (terms in your agreement).
Shortlist typically in 72 hours · 30-day replacement support · Month-to-month
Many successful startups were built on Rails, and many of those apps are now eight or ten years old. They still make money, but the test suite takes forty minutes, the Rails version is several majors behind, and a handful of gems have been abandoned by their maintainers. New features take longer each quarter.
A senior Rails developer is comfortable in that kind of codebase. They know the conventions well enough to see where an app drifted from them, and they can upgrade, speed up and extend it without a risky rewrite.
Moving apps across major Rails versions with dual booting and deprecation clean-up.
Eager loading, sensible indexes and queries that scale.
RSpec or Minitest suites that are fast and trusted.
Sidekiq or similar, with retries and idempotent jobs.
Turbo and Stimulus for server-rendered apps, or clean JSON APIs for separate front ends.
Strong parameters, authentication, dependency updates and Brakeman checks.
Stuck on old versions. Unsupported Rails and Ruby versions stop getting security fixes, and every year of delay makes the upgrade harder.
N+1 queries and slow pages. ActiveRecord makes it easy to write code that runs hundreds of queries per request. It works in development and falls over in production.
Fat models, tangled callbacks. Business logic hidden in model callbacks makes behaviour hard to predict and harder to test.
Every engineer we put forward has at least five years of hands-on experience. Within that, here is how the levels differ.
Senior Developer (5–8 years). Builds features in Rails with RSpec or Minitest, background jobs in Sidekiq, and clean ActiveRecord queries. Comfortable with Hotwire or an API-only back end for a React front end.
Lead / Architect (8+ years). Owns upgrades, performance, service boundaries and database design, and can decide when part of the monolith should become a separate service.
Rails and Ruby upgrades. Step-by-step upgrades with dual booting and test coverage, without a feature freeze
Performance fixes. Finding N+1 queries, slow endpoints and heavy background jobs, then fixing them
Feature work on mature apps. Extending older codebases carefully, with tests added around the areas that change
APIs for mobile and React clients. JSON APIs with authentication, versioning and documentation
Week one. They get the test suite running locally, read the main models and check Ruby, Rails and gem versions.
Weeks two and three. First features or fixes shipped with tests, often alongside small performance improvements they spot.
Week four. A written upgrade and clean-up plan covering versions, risky gems and the slowest parts of the app.
Rewriting instead of upgrading. A rewrite of a working Rails app is rarely cheaper than a careful upgrade. Ask candidates how they would upgrade yours.
Ignoring the test suite. A slow or flaky suite stops people running it. Fixing it is often the first job.
Hiring for Ruby syntax alone. Rails conventions, ActiveRecord behaviour and the gem ecosystem matter more than the language itself.
Rates depend on seniority, scope and engagement length. See the cost guide for market ranges, or tell us the role and we will give you a firm number.
Tell us the role and we will typically send a shortlist within 72 hours.
Tell Us the RoleTell us the role. Three to five profiles, typically within 72 hours.