Senior Backend Software Engineer (Ruby on Rails)

🌍 About Sortlist

At Sortlist, we connect businesses with the right marketing and creative agencies.

Our mission is to help teams make better decisions, faster — by combining technology, data, and human expertise.

We’re a fast-moving, product-led company with a strong engineering culture built around autonomy, technical excellence, and impact.

💡 Your Role

As a Senior Backend Software Engineer, you’ll be a cornerstone of one of our two cross-functional tribes, helping us evolve our Ruby on Rails-based platform and shape the future of B2B matchmaking.

This role goes beyond writing code — you’ll act as a technical leader, bringing product thinking, architectural clarity, and operational excellence. You’ll help guide technical direction, ensure long-term maintainability, and mentor peers — while staying close to the product and user problems that drive our roadmap.

💼 What We Offer

• 💻 Modern equipment: MacBook or high-end Linux setup — your choice.
• Join the team in Wavre for collaboration 2 days/week, and work remotely the remaining 3 days (with flexibility for travel or family needs).
• 🏠 Hybrid work: 2 days/week of in-office collaboration in Wavre, 3 days remote — flexible for trips or family needs.
• 🕹 Autonomy: Engineers at Sortlist are trusted to make real technical decisions.
• 📚 Learning budget: €1000/year for courses, conferences, and growth.
• 💰 Competitive benefits: Meal vouchers, mobility budget or company car, comprehensive health insurance, progressive holidays, and net allowances.
• 🌴 Real work-life balance: No weekend pings, no on-call grind. Rest is valued.
• 💬 Team culture: Tight-knit, humble, and supportive. We celebrate learning and ownership over hierarchy.

We do so much more for our employees! We’d love to tell you more, so don’t hesitate to ask. 😊

🔧 What You’ll Do

🏁 1. Own and Deliver Impact

• Solve real problems that create the most value for users and the business.
• Design and implement backend solutions balancing performance, simplicity, and scalability.
• Make pragmatic trade-offs — whether through code, configuration, or process.

🧱 2. Lead by Example

• Promote clean architecture, robust testing, and clear documentation.
• Elevate our engineering standards around code reviews, CI/CD, observability, and performance monitoring.
• Help your team make sound, informed technical decisions.
• Embrace AI as part of your daily routine

🚀 3. Operate What You Build

• Own the full lifecycle: from design to deployment to monitoring in production.
• Improve reliability, developer experience, and runtime performance.
• Participate in incident reviews and contribute to a culture of operational excellence.

🤝 4. Mentor and Collaborate

• Coach and empower medior engineers through pairing, feedback, and leadership.
• Collaborate closely with your Product Manager, Product Designer to shape bets from concept to delivery.
• Foster a culture of ownership, curiosity, and psychological safety.

🧰 Our Tech Stack

We operate a modern stack built for developer happiness, scalability, and simplicity:

• 🛠 Backend: Ruby on Rails 7 (API-only)
• ⚛️ Frontend: React / Next.js
• 🗄 Databases: PostgreSQL, Google BigQuery
• ☁️ Infrastructure: Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, Docker
• 🔍 Observability: DataDog, Sentry, structured logs
• ⚙️ CI/CD: GitHub Actions

You’ll have space to influence and evolve this stack — we value engineers who care deeply about developer productivity and maintainable architecture.

🧩 What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of experience building web applications (ideally with Ruby on Rails).
• Solid understanding of web architecture, scalability, and database design.
• Experience operating apps in production — logging, monitoring, debugging, optimizing.
• A strong ownership mindset — you care about maintainable, observable, and resilient systems.
• Collaborative spirit and comfort working in cross-functional teams.
• Balance between pragmatism and perfectionism — knowing when to polish and when to ship.
• Fluent in English and French (our working languages).

Bonus points for:

✨ Mentoring experience or technical leadership.

☁️ Cloud infrastructure (AWS) and IaC tools (Terraform).

📦 Experience with distributed systems or event-driven architecture.

🚀 Why Join Sortlist

You’ll be joining a company that believes great products come from small, empowered teams. We value clarity over control, impact over activity, and learning over perfection.

If you’re passionate about building elegant, scalable systems that make a difference — and you want to work where engineering excellence meets real product impact — we’d love to meet you.

👉 Apply now and let’s build something meaningful together.