Martian Careers

Evil Martians are looking for a fully remote Ruby Backend Engineer to join our distributed team.

What We Offer

• $65K – $110K gross annual salary.
• We are a remote-first company and we hire globally (19 years of remote experience and async communication). However, to maintain a healthy work-life balance for our workers, we require a minimum of 3 hours of daily overlap with the Pacific Timezone.
• We can support your relocation to Portugal if you want.
• A significant impact: Work in a small, dedicated team, collaborating directly with startup founders and engineers. You won’t just close tickets—you’ll shape products, care for the business, and solve real user problems.
• Architectural freedom: Lead a new project every one to two years. You’ll have the autonomy to choose the technology stack and make key architectural decisions from the ground up.
• Transparent finances and revenue sharing.
• Open source culture (AnyCable, Yabeda, TestProf, and many other popular projects were created here). Support for conference speaking and professional growth.
• Most of the people in your team can code, including founders, managers, and designers.

You Fit This Position If

1. Ruby and Rails. “Ruby is for developer happiness” are not empty words for you. You know the Rails Way and when it’s better to derail from it.
2. Performance optimization expertise. Experience optimizing Ruby and Rails applications, detecting and fixing performance bottlenecks, dealing with emergencies, and collaborating with our SRE team when needed.
3. Database mastery. Advanced knowledge and optimization experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL specifically), and some experience with non-relational databases (Redis, Elasticsearch).
4. Adaptable to any codebase. Ready to work with codebases of varying age—sometimes starting projects with a clean slate, sometimes improving legacy codebases to optimize them and bring in modern software engineering practices.
5. Programming polyglot (or willing to become one). Besides Ruby, we use Go, TypeScript, Elixir and Rust on our project backends—sometimes for microservices, sometimes entire projects are written in non-Ruby languages.
6. Think like a product owner. You are driven to understand the “why” behind your work. For you, engineering is about helping people and businesses succeed. You understand the processes of a modern startup.
7. You don’t just use a step-by-step guide instead always try to learn your tools very deeply. Advanced knowledge of Ruby and Ruby on Rails, with experience organizing large codebases in a clean and maintainable way, testing and profiling Ruby code.
8. A “manager of one.” You are a master of your own time and can work effectively without micromanagement. You practice careful reading, clear async communication, and proactive questioning. You can work asynchronously, document your ideas and solutions, self-manage planning, and take ownership of tasks.
9. You have good English writing skills and aren’t afraid to speak on calls. Russian speaking skill would be a big advantage for communicating with our Russian-speaking teammates in Europe, the US, and Japan.

How to Apply

Don’t send us a standard CV.

Send us an email to obey-backend@evilmartians.com with your full name as the email subject.

The email must be in Russian.

In your email:

1. Your story. Tell us about your experience, interests, your previous projects, and your role (what did you do or achieve).
2. Code showcase. As a starting point, we need to see some sample code. You can send us links to your GitHub projects or Pull Requests. You can also create (secret) GitHub Gists to send us code samples from your closed source projects: something that solves a non-obvious, advanced task, or examples of beautiful code. Ideally, you would also describe what the code does, include tests, and a general description of the feature or the problem relevant to the code.
3. Location & relocation. Mention your current location and if you’re open to relocation. We do not hire in Russia.

The Hiring Process

1. We check out your code snippets—or ask for a few more samples.
2. A technical interview via Zoom (in Russian). Important: we will NOT ask you to participate in stressful “whiteboard” programming, nor do we ask lame, dated “puzzle” interview questions. We’re interested in your knowledge, experience and potential.
3. A take-home test task. Usually we’ll ask you to write a new library (Ruby gem) or make a pull request for an existing open source project. We’ll strive to provide good feedback throughout the process, and, if the task is generally complete but still requires some changes, the chance to improve it. Beyond the interview, you could use the result of this task to extend your personal open source portfolio; sometimes these become proper, valuable projects in the Ruby community, or valued as important changes to existing libraries. Some ended up in the Ruby Weekly newsletter.
4. Zoom interview with the CEO of Evil Martians.

We always respond with detailed feedback so you see the areas where you can pump your skills.

If you already have a lot of consultancy experience with US clients and open-source/talks impact, mention it in the email, and we can speed up the process.

What You’ll Do

• Explain your decisions and architecture.
• Be the “manager of one”: clarify your tasks, set expectations, provide transparency with clear communication and accountability, and bring your best work and opinions proactively.
• Ask for help without waiting for a “better moment”.
• Use Ruby to build web applications (API only or fullstack), developer and infrastructure tools. Knowledge of other languages (Go, Rust, Python) is not a requirement but a big plus. Fullstack Rails experience is also a big plus.
• Conduct performance audits of web applications and CI/CD workflows. Prepare to deep dive into databases and Ruby VM internals.
• Code alone or in a team; in many cases, one or two of our Frontend Engineers work on a project.
• Work with different code bases: refactor old code as well as build greenfield projects.
• Be passionate about understanding the product and developing empathy for people using it, and work side by side with product owners and designers.
• Communicate with clients and teams that work in the following time zones for at least a few hours per working day: PST (US West Coast, GMT-8), EST (US East Coast, GMT-5), CET (European Time).

About the Company

• Evil Martians is a product development consultancy working for startups building developer tools and professional products.
• Our clients are mainly in the US and include recognized developer tools (bolt.new, Teleport, Tines, HTTPie, NATS), and Y Combinator alumni that have grown into industry unicorns (Rootly, Teleport, Podium).
• We love open source. Likely, you are already using one of our tools like AnyCable, TestProf, Yabeda, Action Policy, and others. For us, and hopefully for you, open source is not just about stars in popular repositories, but a philosophy to adhere to and an ecosystem in which we exist.
• We speak at the most popular Ruby conferences around the world, from Ruby Kaigi to Rails World, and organize Ruby meetups and SF Ruby Conference. Public speaking is a key ingredient to our authenticity.
• To learn more about our work, our clients, and our engineering culture, read our blog.