About Onward

At Onward, we're nurturing wellbeing - one ride, one visit, one moment of connection at a time. Our door-through-door Companion rideshare services and transportation management platform help individuals with mobility and cognitive challenges access healthcare, community resources, and daily essentials. We work with healthcare systems, PACE programs, public transportation agencies, and health plans to improve care access, reduce missed appointments, and relieve the burden of caregiving.

If you thrive in fast-moving environments, love wearing multiple hats, want to help shape a category-defining business and lead a high-performing team, we want to talk.

Reports to: Solutions Engineering Lead

Location: Remote (US) with occasional travel

Salary: $125,000-$140,000

GitHub website link required for application consideration.

Overview

We are looking for a Senior Back-End Engineer to build and scale features using Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL, with a strong focus on DevOps practices and infrastructure ownership. You will own the full application lifecycle — from optimizing geospatial routing services to designing and maintaining the CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and observability systems our engineering team depends on. Solid DevOps experience is central to this role; we value engineers who treat privacy, security, stability and observability of the product as one of the core values

What You’ll Do

Build Amazing Features

• Collaborate with Product Management and your fellow engineers to design features that address real-world challenges.
• Convert product requirements into Agile user stories with actionable implementation strategies.
• Write high-quality code to deliver fully tested, working features on time.
• Partner with the QA team to ensure every feature meets our quality standards.

Own DevOps & Infrastructure

• Design, build, and maintain CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions) for reliable, zero-downtime deployments across our Heroku and AWS environments.
• Manage cloud infrastructure and secrets (AWS SSM Parameter Store, IAM, RDS, S3) with a security-first mindset.
• Containerize services using Docker and ensure builds are reproducible and optimized (multi-stage builds, Alpine or Debian base images).
• Own and improve our background job infrastructure (Sidekiq, Solid Queue) including scheduling, retries, and failure alerting.
• Configure and maintain observability tooling — logging, metrics, and alerting (e.g., Sentry and etc.) — to catch issues before customers do.
• Manage database operations on Heroku-hosted PostgreSQL / AWS RDS, including migrations, query tuning, index management, and PostGIS usage.
• Drive infrastructure-as-code practices and document runbooks for critical systems.

Support and Optimize Applications

• Develop a deep understanding of our existing applications, logic, and codebase.
• Troubleshoot and resolve issues in real time, ensuring applications run smoothly.
• Optimize performance by utilizing logging, monitoring tools, and resource tuning (databases, servers).

Collaborate Across Teams

• Participate in Agile development ceremonies like daily scrums, grooming, planning, and design sessions.
• Perform code reviews and share problem-solving strategies with your fellow engineers.
• Contribute to fostering a culture of technical excellence and innovation.

Drive Technical Excellence

• Deliver scalable, maintainable solutions that align with our customers’ needs and our company’s mission.
• Continuously refine your skills, stay curious, and embrace new challenges.

What You Bring

• Required:
• • Back-End Mastery: Proficiency working with Postgres DB (hosted on AWS and Heroku), Ruby on Rails, and GraphQL APIs.
  • DevOps Depth: Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or similar), Docker, cloud platforms (AWS preferred), and infrastructure automation.
  • Proven Experience: 6+ years of hands-on experience delivering software applications in production environments (healthcare or transportation industry experience is a plus).
  • Cloud Savvy: Experience working with cloud platforms, including automating resource provisioning and crafting cost-efficient solutions.
  • Agile Advocate: Comfortable working in Agile environments (Scrum or Kanban), collaborating with diverse teammates and stakeholders.
  • Track Record of Success: Proven ability to build and deploy commercially successful technology solutions.
  • Problem-Solving Pro: Adaptable, curious, and ready to tackle the unknown with confidence.

• Nice to Have:
• • Advanced Degree: A Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related technical field.

• Monitoring and Observability: Develop and implement robust monitoring, logging, and alerting systems to ensure the health, performance, and explainability of deployed ML models.
• Geospatial Optimization: Practical experience with geospatial & optimization (routing, assignment, queuing, etc.)
• Security & Compliance: Familiarity with SOC 2, HIPAA, or similar compliance requirements relevant to healthcare data.

Why Join Onward?

• Mission-Driven Impact: Build technology that removes barriers to care and connection
• High-Growth Environment: Learn and grow within a scaling product and engineering organization
• Strong Product Partnership: Work closely with a hands-on Sr. Director of Product
• Collaborative Culture: Join a team committed to empathy, quality, and real-world outcomes

While we appreciate AI during development and work - we don't appreciate using it during interview. Candidates using AI interview tools would be rejected.