Ruby on Rails Developer

BIMM•Toronto, ON

15h•CA$80,000 - CA$130,000•Hybrid

About The Position

BIMM is seeking an experienced Senior Ruby on Rails Developer on a contract basis to join their team. This role operates under a hybrid model, requiring two days per week in the office. BIMM is a Toronto-based agency focused on data, technology, and creativity to deliver high-performing campaigns and digital products. The Technology department is a distributed team of over 50 developers, QA, and architects. This is an active role with immediate impact and a clear place on the team. The engagement involves a multi-year program to modernize the digital platform for a major media and entertainment client. The platform is a large Ruby on Rails 8 application serving a high-traffic public website, acting as an editorial CMS, and integrating with client systems for ticketing, event management, and CRM. The work includes a website refresh, CMS authoring experience improvements, hardening third-party integrations, developing a new API layer for a companion mobile app, and security and performance enhancements ahead of seasonal traffic peaks. The focus is on extending and strengthening the existing Rails application, not a complete rewrite.

Requirements

5+ years building and shipping production Ruby on Rails applications, including substantial time in a large existing codebase you did not originally write.
Production experience with Hotwire Turbo Drive, Turbo Frames, Turbo Streams and Stimulus.
Recent Rails 7 or Rails 8 experience, with a working understanding of what changed and why.
Strong PostgreSQL skills schema and index design, query optimization, reading EXPLAIN output, and finding and fixing N+1 queries.
Background job design with Sidekiq or equivalent idempotency, retry semantics, failure handling, and queue isolation.
Third-party API and webhook integration experience, ideally with upstream systems you do not control and cannot fully trust. Examples: ticketing platforms, CRMs such as HubSpot or Salesforce, event or content management systems.
Automated testing in a server-rendered stack RSpec or Minitest, request specs, and system or integration tests with Capybara.
Tailwind CSS and fluency in semantic, well-structured HTML.
Accessible front-end development to WCAG 2.1 AA, including keyboard navigation, focus management, and correct use of ARIA where markup alone is insufficient.
Authentication and authorization experience session and token handling, passwordless or magic-link flows, OAuth2/OIDC concepts, and role-based access control. Familiarity with a hosted auth provider (SuperTokens, Auth0, Clerk) or Devise.
Observability practice: structured logging, metrics, and APM tooling (New Relic, Datadog, Scout, or Skylight), and comfort defining what "healthy" looks like for a service.
Git and pull-request based collaboration, with clear commit history and review-ready changes.
Professional fluency in written and spoken English, and the ability to work with at least four hours of daily overlap with Eastern Time.

Nice To Haves

Deployment on a managed PaaS: Heroku or comparable plus AWS S3 for asset storage.
Hotwire Native (formerly Turbo Native) on iOS or Android: path configuration, bridge components, or native screen integration. This is a significant differentiator for this engagement.
CMS and content modelling in Rails Action Text or Trix, ViewComponent or Phlex, block-based or component-based page builders.
Search infrastructure PostgreSQL full-text search at scale, or Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Typesense, or Algolia, including faceted filtering and relevance tuning.
High-traffic or event-driven traffic patterns ticket on-sales, launches, or seasonal spikes and load testing ahead of them.
CDN and edge caching alongside personalized content Fastly, Cloudflare, or similar.
Security remediation experience Brakeman, bundler-audit, dependency triage, and familiarity with the OWASP Top 10 in a Rails context.
Rails and Ruby version upgrade work, including dependency and gem migration in a large application.
Analytics and marketing instrumentation GA4, Google Tag Manager, conversion and funnel event tracking, consent handling.
Domain exposure in media, entertainment, live events, ticketing, or membership and subscription products.

Responsibilities

Build and extend features across a Rails 8 monolith models, controllers, background jobs, and server-rendered views.
Implement rich, interactive front-end behavior using Hotwire (Turbo Drive, Turbo Frames, Turbo Streams) and Stimulus, styled with Tailwind CSS.
Contribute to a shared component and view-partial library that keeps a large template surface consistent and maintainable.
Extend an in-house Rails CMS broaden rich-text editing coverage, introduce reusable content snippets, and move hard-coded page regions into editable configuration.
Help design and build a component-based page builder, including the underlying content model and migration of existing authored content.
Work directly with editorial and marketing stakeholders to understand how authoring actually happens before designing for it.
Build and harden integrations with third-party event-management, ticketing, and CRM platforms REST APIs, webhooks, and scheduled syncs.
Replace brittle or manual reconciliation processes with resilient, idempotent integrations that include retry and backoff, dead-letter handling, and automated reconciliation.
Design and operate Sidekiq workflows with attention to concurrency, ordering, and failure modes.
Instrument integrations so failures surface early and are diagnosable without guesswork.
Design and build a versioned API layer on the existing Rails stack to support a companion mobile app and downstream data consumers.
Handle authentication, authorization, rate limiting, pagination, and consumer-facing documentation from the outset.
Collaborate with mobile engineers on contract design and on serving native-specific view variants where the app renders server HTML.
Profile and optimize application and database performance against sharp, predictable seasonal traffic peaks.
Implement caching strategies that hold up when pages contain personalized content — fragment and Russian-doll caching, and edge-cacheable shells with dynamically loaded personal regions.
Support the introduction of a CDN and automated scaling in front of the existing PaaS hosting.
Contribute to load testing ahead of known peak events.
Help prioritize, execute, and validate security remediation across an existing codebase, and build securely in all new work.
Write meaningful automated tests unit, request, and system-level and raise coverage in the areas you touch.
Participate in code review as both author and reviewer, and contribute to technical acceptance criteria on tickets you pick up.