Want to be part of something different?
You can when you work with us.
We are looking for a talented person to come onboard with our engineering department to work from home in the position of a Ruby on Rails Senior Level Engineer. You’ll take on the challenge of improving the overall efficiency of Empire Flippers by developing fully fledged platforms, ensuring both the user experience and functionality are elevated to unprecedented levels. You’ll be working alongside Lead Backend Engineer Ben Gelsey, VP of Engineering James Andrews, and the rest of the engineering team.
This is a huge opportunity for you to work with one of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S. and learn the ins and outs of the online business world. Over the last couple of years, our company has seen explosive growth—and there is no sign of it slowing down. In order to keep hitting our goals, we need to expand our horizons and improve our customer experience to a point that makes us the de-facto standard of excellence for buying and selling online businesses. Your work will help propel the industry forward to new levels not seen before!
Being a location-independent full time position is one of the many benefits. You’ll be free to work anywhere in the world outside of the USA (with the exception of Colorado, Florida, or Texas). Be it the beaches in Thailand – which does have superb 4G connectivity and cheaper cost of living – or in a mountain resort in the Swiss Alps – the choice is yours. *see USA resident requirements below.
Competitive salary based on experience • Range $85,000 – $100,000/year.
If this sounds like an exciting opportunity for you, then read on to learn more about our company and how to apply for the position!
Job Details
What’s Our Story?
Empire Flippers started in 2011. Back then, we were known as the AdSense Flippers, and we were all about building our own niche sites. We would monetize those sites via Google AdSense. Once the sites were making a little money, we would sell them on Flippa for 20x their net monthly profit.
We recorded our entire journey by blogging all about it.
It was a nice little business and soon we built quite a following of people who loved what we were up to. It got to the point where people asked us if we would use our Flippa account to sell their sites. They told us it would sell easier since we had the audience, and they would pay us a percentage of the sale.
So… we said yes.
It wasn’t long before we were selling way more of other people’s sites than our own.
We realized there was something here. Something big.
In 2012, we rebranded to Empire Flippers and became an online business brokerage in our own right. We launched our marketplace and became the “go-to” solution for people wanting to sell their online businesses.
Fast forward to today, we now have the largest brokerage team in the industry. We have staff that is siloed for each part of the selling and buying process — everyone from marketing and sales team members, to vetting and migration experts.
Now, we’re inviting you to become part of our story.
What’s the Opportunity?
Becoming a Senior Ruby on Rails Engineer makes you a critical part of Empire Flippers. You will learn skills that will last you a lifetime in the online business world and provide skills that will enhance our business intelligence system to help us make better decisions.
We’ll teach you the ins and outs of the online business brokerage industry, coming from years of experience. You’ll work on improving the customer journey, which should be flawless, pain free and easy to navigate. For many of our customers it is the first time either buying or selling an online business, which can be an incredibly anxious and confusing moment in their lives. You’ll be helping them directly by providing them with an easy to use interface that just makes sense.
This is a full time position – our company is growing at a fast rate, which means excellent opportunities for personal and career growth. We may ask you to attend conferences too – once the world reopens – which can help you network with industry leaders.
What’s the Senior Ruby on Rails Engineer Position Like?
The Senior Ruby on Rails Engineer position is vital to the success of our company, partnering with all departments to align technology strategy with the company’s objectives.
You’ll be responsible for the full software development lifecycle, from conception to deployment building high quality, architecturally sound systems. You will use your initiative to design and implement server-side architecture, as well as implement API’s and integrations that address our business needs. Both our clients and staff will be using the software you write and you’ll be responsible for monitoring system performance and configuring new software and hardware.
Our small and close knit engineering team currently consists of a UX specialist, 5 engineers and 3 QA specialists. You’ll work closely with the team to implement solutions for all departments within Empire Flippers, be it compliance, customer support, sales and migrations. Additional responsibilities could lead to supervising our engineering team.
What Skills Do I Need?
We believe in hiring people that are a good fit for us culturally.
A good fit is actually more important to us than the skill set since we will teach you everything you need to know about our industry.
You must have a passion for travel, ideally with long periods of digital nomad experience with travel outside your home country.
- You must have 2+ years of Ruby on Rails experience under your belt, having built RoR applications.
- An in-depth understanding of database management systems, both relational and non-relational databases.
- You should be a ninja with every component of our tech stack. You must have a complete working knowledge of Ruby on Rails, Postgres, Sidekiq, Rspec, Git, Redis.
- Experience working with a wide range of 3rd party integrations. Our platform talks to many 3rd party applications, you should have experience building and maintaining such integrations in a test driven fashion.
- Dev-ops/sysadmin skills, particularly AWS. Experience with managing servers, maintaining hosting environments, being responsible for uptime and responsiveness, addressing bottlenecks, ensuring backups are kept safe and sound.
- You need to have immaculate attention to detail. We need to hear you grunting and moaning if something doesn’t quite look or feel right, to the nearest code change and to the nearest hexadecimal color, to the point you become annoying to us. At times other developers may edit your code, you’ll be watching to ensure the code base remains readable, scalable and fast.
- Be a good communicator. It sounds very cliché, but you’ll immerse yourself in almost every department. You’ll be learning problems and presenting solutions, and overseeing the implementation of those solutions too.
- A self-starter. We need to see some evidence that you’re able to get up every morning, bite the bullet and just get on with it, even if you’ve tried four coffee shops and none have decent wifi. You won’t have eyes looking over your shoulder on a day to day basis, you’ll be working in almost full autonomy. We’ll need to trust you to deliver the goods. We don’t believe in micro-management.
The following skills/experience would be a bonus, but not required:
PHP/WordPress. We will be interfacing with WordPress significantly, being able to speak the same language would be great.
React. Our frontend code is built in React, being able to go in and patch things up as and when required would be a big benefit to us.
Caching. The software we’re building needs to be fast and to remain fast as we scale, both in terms of traffic and database size. Having experience with Memcached, Varnish or experience with complicated CDN setups with many rules would be a plus.
CI/CD: We’re huge advocates for automated tests in a continuous fashion, which allows us to rapidly deploy new features every single day without fear of breaking out applications.
What’s the Lifestyle Like?
Our company is built on the foundation of travel, remote work, and living life on your own terms.
We’re not looking to put you in a cubicle and waste your time in traffic. You’ll be working hard, playing hard, and learning all about our company and what we stand for during this time.
Apart from meeting us in person every now and then, you’re free to work and live anywhere you’d like and join the new class of digital nomads – we’re homeless but have a passport, debit card and a laptop.
You’ll become friends with people who will be able to give you massive insights into how digital businesses work, how they scale, and, of course, how to invest in them or sell them.
Love It. What’s the Catch?
This isn’t a gap year experience. This is not a temporary contract.
If you’re applying just because you want something to fund your travels before you start seeking out a “serious” job, then you probably shouldn’t apply.
We’re looking for career-minded people who share our vision and see where we’re going. We want you to be part of that vision and help us get there over the long haul.
And while we play hard and sometimes really do work next to the pool all day, we work even harder. Sometimes you will be putting in a 10-12 hour day as business demands arise. You’ll be working weird hours to match other team members time zones, and you’ll sometimes have to face some critical feedback. And if there’s a bug in your code that’s blocking a multi-million dollar deal, expect a phone call at 3am.
You will be expected to perform to our expectations and really help us grow our business to the next level. We’re counting on you.
Apart from meeting us in person every now and then, you’re free to work and live anywhere you’d like and join the new class of digital nomads – we’re homeless but have a passport, credit card, and a laptop.
You’ll become friends with people who will be able to give you massive insights into how digital businesses work, how they scale, and, of course, how to invest in them or sell them.
If you can see yourself growing into a profitable and meaningful career with us and love what we do, we want you to be part of our team.
Details to Keep in Mind
We’re going to start you off slow. You’ll first learn about our company and what each department does; then you will be given some low-level tasks to ease you into the position. We aren’t going to throw you to the wolves — you’ll be part of a high-functioning team that is here to help wherever we can.
Joe Magnotti, James Andrews and Ben Gelsey will be reviewing every application. If we think you’re a good fit, we will reach out to you to do a video call interview. After the first interviews are done, our final candidates will be brought back for a second interview before we make our decision.
*US resident requirements: If you are in the US, we will accept candidates residing in Texas, Florida, or Colorado, as we are registered for payroll in these states. Otherwise, US candidates should plan to live abroad or have plans to relocate to Texas, Florida, or Colorado.
We have a no side project policy: we do not allow any ownership, association, or affiliations with online businesses or websites. If you are the owner of an online business, then you will be expected to either sell the business before you join us or sunset it upon accepting a job offer from us. If you are not comfortable with this, please do not apply.
A background check is required.
How Do I Apply?
Here is the sequence of events we use when hiring our Senior Ruby on Rails Engineer:
- You fill out an application, providing answers that best explain who you are and why you’re a good fit for the position, and submit it ASAP.
- We review submissions and schedule interviews.
- Second interviews are conducted, and a final decision is made.
- The chosen candidate will begin as soon as possible!
If you’re thinking about applying but are worried you might not have enough (insert excuse here) — don’t worry. If you want to build something more than just a 9-to-5 job, then click the “apply” button below.
We look forward to working with you soon!