Help us solve the developing world’s energy needs with software

Join us as our Sr Rails Engineer, Platforms

Zola Electric is the leader in providing sustainable, affordable energy solutions for the world’s most complex markets. Today we deliver solar energy to nearly a million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, enabled by innovative hardware and software. Our team is responsible for Zola Electric’s core software platform–the operating system for the business–and the applications and data tools that sit on top of it.

our team installing a panel onto a customers roof

As a senior technologist in the Digital Platforms department, you’ll be instrumental in architecting and developing the systems that enable our rapidly growing international customer base and workforce. You will drive the primary architecture and design of our centralized API and integrations application.

Essential Job Functions

• Guiding a large Rails application towards a more mature modular direction, with an increased focus on ease of modification and configurability
• Helping design a clearer vision of the boundaries and patterns driving the future architecture of the app
• Enabling robust integration support for both in-house and 3rd party integrations, helping us get the most out of integrated solutions and offloading anything not core to the business
• Continuing to migrate from REST APIs towards expanding our platform’s next-generation GraphQL APIs, adding functionality and robustness to our growing internal and partner APIs
• Develop processes to improve code quality for growing team, carrying out code reviews as part of the continuous deployment pipeline
• Participate in Pair Programming on a semi-regular basis assisting developers
• Work closely with Product Management and the dev team developing features that add clear value to our users
• Building workflow-based UIs with React for the independent, web-based static front-end client
• Maintaining and incrementally improving a large Application with 5 years of history, both full of powerful historical insights and not entirely understood corners
• Collaborating effectively in a distributed team, using a pragmatic, agile process

Ideal Qualifications

• 7+ years’ experience with web backends
• 1-year experience with any front-end framework (React, Angular, etc)
• 2+ years experience with Rails web framework
• Experience with TDD, Git, Microservices, and Performance Optimizations
• Experience in production debugging, monitoring, and maintenance
• Experience with Distributed Teams

What Else We’re Looking For

• Lifelong Learner. You are committed to self-improvement, which means you’ve sought and found mentors to learn from. You’re also a natural at mentoring, teaching, and reviewing others’ work, help other engineers make sound architectural decisions, improve their code quality, and get out of their comfort zone. Because you know there’s always more to learn, you don’t get hung up on knowing everything before taking action. As you know so well, taking action is often the only way to discover if something works.
• Technical mastery. You have worked with and deployed several frameworks and languages. You have favorite frameworks, languages, and methods but enjoy learning and digging into new things. You enjoy working on both smaller and newer applications and large applications with years of operational experience under the hood.
• User-centered orientation. As much as you love technical challenges for their own sake, you’re inspired by making things that work for real people. You ask tough questions about how requested features solve user problems, and have a great track record of collaborating with designers and product managers on solutions.
• Clear Communication. You enjoy working as part of a distributed team. You realize that the key to successful remote work is trust, which comes from regular communication through tools like Slack, and respect for the team’s agile process (e.g., Jira stories and GitHub pull requests). You also know the value of face-to-face interaction, even if only through web conferencing tools, and have enjoyed being a great teammate in virtualized contexts.
• Pragmatism. In a discussion of how to build a feature you will reliably bring people back to the question of what are we trying to achieve, and how will we know when we’re successful? You love new technologies, but will only recommend them if they are the most effective way of solving the problem at hand, and are an expert in playing a devil’s advocate of your own ideas. You are drawn to measure the results of changes to user experiences and look for opportunities to remove features if they are not being used (or used well).
• Lateral thinking. In software so many of the leaps forward on the non-obvious ones, hence you have a well-honed sense for knowing when to apply oblique methods to a challenging problem that evades straightforward approaches. This may mean being able to connect the dots across different domains (anthropology, economics, psychology, politics), but it always means being willing to suspend judgment through the process of divergence and convergence.
• Curiosity. Unsatisfied with accepted wisdom, you’ll ask why multiple times when wrapping your head around a new concept or proposal. You’re also fascinated with the kinds of problems your peers in the industry are solving, and the novel approaches they’re taking. This leads you to be involved in local user meetings, online communities, and conferences.

Other information

You can learn more about us on Twitter, Facebook and our Website. If you are interested in joining our team in either the US (East Coast preferred) or Amsterdam, Netherlands, you can submit your resume via our career page.