Staff Engineer / Team Lead (Ruby on Rails)

ListLab is a funded startup looking for a Staff Engineer / Team Lead specializing in Ruby on Rails. In this high-velocity individual contributor role, you will take ownership of product development, working directly with stakeholders to define and ship features rapidly while leveraging AI tools to enhance productivity.

Responsibilities:

• Ship Rails features fast — own the full cycle from stakeholder conversation to production deployment, using AI tooling to maximize throughput
• Define and decompose work — break ambiguous business problems into well-specified, right-sized tickets that serve as both alignment artifacts and AI prompts
• Own product for your area — work directly with stakeholders to understand what needs to be built, make scope and prioritization decisions, and ensure what ships actually solves the problem
• Set the velocity standard — demonstrate what's possible when a senior engineer combines deep Rails expertise with disciplined AI-assisted workflows
• Review and elevate — review PRs, validate AI-generated output, and raise the quality bar across the codebase
• Collaborate on architecture — contribute to technical decisions on Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, and related infrastructure
• Document what works — capture patterns, workflows, and decomposition strategies that help the whole team move faster

Requirements:

• Deep Ruby on Rails expertise — you've built and shipped production Rails applications and you know the framework inside and out (PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, Active Job, etc.)
• Proven AI-assisted development chops — you're already using AI tooling (Cursor, Copilot, or similar) to ship meaningfully faster, and you have opinions about what works and what doesn't
• The 'senior who makes juniors productive' skillset — you know how to specify work clearly enough that someone (or something) less experienced can execute it well. You give great direction, catch issues early in review, and don't waste cycles on rework
• Product instincts — you genuinely enjoy talking to stakeholders, understanding user problems, and making calls about what to build and what to cut. You've done this before, whether or not your title said 'product'
• Velocity as a value — you care about shipping. You find ways to move fast without cutting corners. You're allergic to unnecessary process and drawn to approaches that compress cycle time
• Strong decomposition skills — you can take a large, ambiguous objective and break it into concrete, well-scoped pieces of work. You think in dependency trees, not to-do lists
• Comfort with startup ambiguity — you thrive when things aren't fully figured out, and you're energized (not paralyzed) by the need to make decisions with incomplete information
• Experience in a staff engineer, tech lead, or principal engineer role at a startup or high-growth company
• Familiarity with spec-driven workflows
• Experience working without a dedicated product manager — you've been the person who figured out what to build
• Background in marketplace, SaaS, or consumer-facing Rails applications
• Experience building or contributing to AI-augmented development workflows at an organizational level