Senior Ruby on Rails Developer (Part-Time Contractor)
Teach Your Monster
Teach Your Monster builds educational games used by millions of children worldwide. Our flagship literacy game Teach Your Monster to Read has reached over 30 million players and is widely used in homes and classrooms.
We’re looking for a senior Ruby on Rails developer to help maintain and evolve the platform that powers our games, user accounts and APIs. This is a contractor role (3-4 days per week) with an initial commitment of 6-12 months, working alongside our product, design and game development teams.
The Role
You’ll work across our Rails platform that supports our games and web services. Typical work includes:
- Maintaining and improving our Ruby on Rails application
- Designing and maintaining APIs used by our games
- Supporting authentication, login and SSO systems
- Improving test coverage, CI/CD and deployment processes
- Refactoring legacy systems and reducing technical debt
- Supporting production systems and investigating operational issues
- Contributing to data and analytics pipelines where needed
This is a hands-on engineering role working on a mature, widely used system.
Requirements
- Strong experience with Ruby on Rails (production apps, not just side projects)
- Excellent, cross-discipline communicator, and able to work autonomously using strong Agile development practises
- Full-stack capability (backend + light frontend work, CSS, JS, databases)
- Confident working with production infrastructure (AWS, servers, environments, deployments), in high-traffic environments, including configuring and maintaining application environments
- API design and maintenance experience
- Experience working with CI/CD and automated testing
- Ability to refactor legacy systems safely
- Strong understanding of secure authentication systems
- Uses modern tooling pragmatically to speed up processes
- Data engineering - ETL
Nice to Have
- Comfortable working in regulated data environments (COPPA)
- BigQuery / DBT experience
- MixPanel warehouse connector experience
- Cloudflare experience
- SSO integrations
- EdTech ecosystem familiarity
- Experience with Clever or similar school systems
- Experience working with children’s products
- Experience **monitoring live systems and responding to operational alerts**, investigating and resolving issues promptly
- Accessibility-first mindset
Who you are
We’re looking for someone who:
- Is a pragmatic senior engineer
- Is comfortable owning systems end-to-end
- Writes clear, maintainable code
- Is calm and methodical when debugging production issues
- Is proactive about improving systems over time
This role is not suitable for agencies or junior developers.
Working Arrangement
- 3-4 days per week
- Freelance contract
- Remote, UK working hours required
- Professional indemnity insurance required
How we work - this is what makes us different!
We work hard at Teach Your Monster to make a great culture for the people working with us:
- We are run like a games studio or a startup, but our focus is on impact not profit
- Although small, we help millions of children every year with our games
- We have an flexible working style - many of us are remote and part-time
- We are family friendly, allowing people to structure their days around their family needs.
- We are keen to grow our team in as diverse and inclusive a way as possible - our team’s differences are what makes us stronger, more creative, highly engaged and more impactful
- We allow for as much autonomy as possible, and want you to work in the way that you feel will bring the best results
- We encourage open and candid communication, and actively encourage you to feedback on anything we could be doing to improve how we work.
If this sounds like a good fit, we’d love to hear from you. Please click apply to upload your CV and a short covering note summarising your experience and why you would like this job.
Interviews will take place in early-mid May.
Please NO recruiters.