Ruby Rails Developer Contract Jobs in Chicago, IL

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Channels power how brands reach customers and foster connections at a global scale. The Channels division is responsible for the entire lifecycle of a message-from the moment a marketer configures a campaign in our dashboard to the moment it's delivered to a user's device. As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will be the technical anchor for the division, helping engineering teams ship faster and safer while evolving the shared technical foundations they all rely on.

In this role, you will bridge the gap between the customer-facing dashboard and the underlying delivery engines. You will split your time between division-wide technical leadership and hands-on work for critical projects. You will partner with engineering managers and technical leads embedded in teams to ensure our architecture supports a maturing suite of channels, while collaborating with senior leadership on initiatives that ensure a consistent, high-quality experience across the entire division.

Together, these teams define how our customers interact with our product and how we interact with the world. Your role is to make sure both are excellent.

In this role you will:

• Partner on the technical vision and quality bar for the division. Drive architectural direction, define best practices, and ensure teams have a clear path to resolving persistent quality and technical debt issues
• Lead large, ambiguous projects end-to-end. Drive efforts that span multiple teams from initial problem framing and design docs through implementation, rollout, and operational support
• Support maturing channels. Help teams evolve their stacks to support more sophisticated marketing use cases, ensuring that foundational primitives are flexible and robust
• Mentor engineers at every level. Simplify hard problems, connect technical decisions to business outcomes, and raise the bar through code review, architecture review, and pairing
• Champion reliability and operability. Improve observability and tighten error handling across the dashboard and delivery layers, advocating for incremental rollouts and reducing division-wide incidents
• Write code. Staff Engineers at Braze are hands-on; you will design and build the foundational systems and frameworks that act as a force multiplier for the organization

Recent and ongoing work across the division includes:

• Developing shared frameworks for our marketing message editors to ensure a consistent experience across all messaging channels
• Evolving the dashboard to support real-time feedback and sophisticated channel-specific settings
• Building platforms and code-generation tooling that allow teams to spin up and mature new channels with minimal friction
• Migrating legacy front-end logic to modern, React-based systems within the dashboard to improve developer and end-user experience

Parts of our stack with which you will work:

• Ruby, Ruby on Rails
• TypeScript, React
• MongoDB
• Event-driven architectures 
• Distributed Systems and API Design

WHO YOU ARE

• Have 10+ years of software engineering experience, including meaningful time as a technical leader influencing multiple teams or complex product systems
• Are comfortable working across the full stack. You have experience in Ruby on Rails and are proficient in modern frontend environments (TypeScript, React) where customers configure their experience
• Have designed and shipped foundational infrastructure. You've built frameworks, libraries, or platform services used by many other engineers to build product features
• Bring strong architectural judgment. You know when to invest in abstraction, when to keep things simple, and how to make technical bets that support a maturing product suite
• Are an effective communicator and mentor. You can translate technical debt into business risk and elevate the engineers around you through coaching and clear technical vision
• Have a track record of identifying highest-leverage work. You can build consensus across different teams and drive projects to completion with minimal direction through high ambiguity

Bonus experience:

• Experience building or maintaining shared component libraries or design system primitives
• Experience with real-time systems or event-driven architectures as they relate to message orchestration
• Experience with developer experience tooling, such as code generation, scaffolding, or CI/CD for large-scale codebases
• Experience maturing a product from "early stage" to "enterprise scale" without losing developer velocity

For candidates based in the United States, the pay range for this position at the start of employment is expected to be between $208,000 and $349,655/year with an expected On Target Earnings (OTE) between $232,000 and $390,000/year (including bonus or commission). Your exact offer may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. In addition to cash compensation, this role qualifies for a comprehensive Total Rewards package that includes equity grants of restricted stock (RSUs) so that you will own a piece of our company.

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