Tech Lead, Ruby on Rails

Finalsite is the first community relationship management platform for K-12 schools, transforming how schools attract students, engage families, build community — and thrive. More than 7,000 schools and districts worldwide trust Finalsite’s integrated platform for their websites, communications, mobile apps, enrollment, and marketing services. Finalsite is headquartered in Glastonbury, CT, USA with employees who work remotely in nearly every state in the U.S. as well as Europe, South America, and Asia.

For more information, please visit The Opportunity

At Finalsite, we empower educators to reach and engage their communities through transformative digital experiences. As our Tech Lead
, you won't just be writing code; you will be the architectural backbone of a platform that processes large amounts of payment volume. By bridging the gap between high-level strategy and hands-on execution, you ensure that schools worldwide can depend on a secure, high-performance financial ecosystem.

The mission of the Tech Lead is to drive the technical excellence, operational stability, and architectural integrity of our Ruby on Rails and React-based payment systems. You will own the end-to-end lifecycle of our applications, from the efficiency of our CI/CD pipelines to the resilience of our AWS infrastructure. Your goal is to serve as a high-impact individual contributor while elevating the entire team through mentorship and the implementation of engineering best practices.

• Architecture Evolution: Successfully lead the design and implementation of at least two major architectural enhancements that improve system scalability or decrease technical debt within the payment ecosystem.

• Operational Excellence: Reduce deployment friction and lead-time by optimizing our Jenkins-based CI/CD system and Terraform configurations.

• Performance Optimization: Improve application response times and database efficiency (MySQL/Mongo
  
  DB), ensuring the platform remains performant during peak high-volume cycles.

• Technical Mentorship: Establish a "culture of quality" by standardizing code review processes and helping at least two mid-to-senior engineers level up their architectural thinking.

• Security & Compliance: Partner with the Security team to ensure 100% compliance with fintech standards, specifically focusing on our Stripe integration and data handling.

• Architect & Build: Spend approximately 60% of your time as a "player-coach," delivering high-quality Ruby on Rails and React code while overseeing overall system design.

• Dev Ops & SRE Ownership: Lead the team’s "you build it, you run it" philosophy by managing AWS infrastructure via Terraform and participating in a rotating on-call schedule.

• SME for Payments: Serve as the primary Subject Matter Expert for our Stripe integration, ensuring seamless processing for payment transactions.

• CI/CD Leadership: Own and optimize the automated deployment pipeline (Jenkins/Git), ensuring code moves from development to production safely and frequently.

• Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate closely with Product Managers and Security Leads to translate business requirements into robust technical specifications.

• Standard Setting: Define and enforce engineering standards for testing, documentation, and performance monitoring across the stack.

• Ruby on Rails Mastery: Deep expertise in building, scaling, and maintaining complex Rails applications.

• Full-Stack Fluency: Strong proficiency in React for front-end development and a solid understanding of how it interfaces with Rails APIs.

• Cloud Infrastructure: Proven experience managing AWS environments using "Infrastructure as Code" (Terraform).

• Data Persistence: Expertise in both relational (MySQL) and non-relational (Mongo
  
  DB) database design, optimization, and scaling.

• Fintech Knowledge: Practical experience with payment gateways (specifically Stripe) and handling large-scale financial data.

• Technical Leadership: Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, perform rigorous code reviews, and lead technical decision-making without a "command and control" approach.

We encourage our…