Application Engineer

We are looking for a versatile generalist who thrives on a high degree of personal responsibility.  You want to be involved in the whole process, all the way from requirements through implementation and deployment, and you enjoy working across the entire application instead of being stuck in a silo.

Location: Location: We prefer candidates who are willing to work in a hybrid environment out of our Boston office. Candidates in the Boston area should expect to work in-office 2 days/week for the first 6 months. Candidates outside the Boston area should expect to travel to Boston for 1 week at a time every 6 weeks for the first six months and 3x per year thereafter.

*PLEASE NOTE: This position is not eligible for visa sponsorships. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without current or future need for sponsorship.

What You’ll Be Doing

As a member of our platform team, you’ll dive into our UI, API and back end to make financial portfolio management scalable and easy to use.  You’ll work closely with our product management team and our users to gather requirements and design solutions.  

To solve the technical challenges, you’ll need to quickly wrap your head around complex user workflows.   You’ll need a solid understanding of computing principles, strong analytical skills and good technical intuition.  You’ll also need good communication skills to explain issues, potential solutions and tradeoffs in ways that make sense to a variety of stakeholders.  Whenever you need to build internal tools or pick up new skills to achieve our goals, you’re able to roll up your sleeves and bootstrap quickly.

About Us

Smartleaf is a Boston-based investment portfolio rebalancing service handling over $90 billion in assets.  Our next milestone is doubling our capacity to handle 1 million accounts.  In order to get to this next level of scale, we need to evolve our architecture and you can have a big impact on how we do that.  

We need a teammate who will ramp up quickly and help us get things done.  If you can bring skill, attention to detail and focus on getting working code into the world, while being a genuinely nice person to work with, we want to talk to you.

You’ll Be a Great Fit If You

• Are a strong individual contributor who can gather requirements, propose a variety of solutions and follow through with implementation

• Are able to dive into unfamiliar codebases and quickly build up working knowledge of how multiple components interact

• Enjoy learning domain and application logic

• Are communicative and self-organizing

• Have a habit of effectively gaining new skills to suit the task

• Are constantly improving your own process to make yourself more effective

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience building production web applications

• Computer Science degree

• Proficiency in Ruby on Rails or similar MVC frameworks with demonstrated ability to learn our stack

• Solid SQL skills for working with a complex data model and high-volume financial data

• Understanding of multiprocessing and multithreading considerations

• Competence working in a Linux environment: familiarity with common command-line utilities and Unix process management; comfortable with bash scripting

Our Culture

We’re a small team that takes pride in providing a high level of service to our clients.  Because of our size, you’ll be able to work closely with teammates from many different business functions.  If you are proactive, competent and reliable there’s ample opportunity to stretch outside your comfort zone.

Tech Stack

Ruby on Rails, Stimulus, React, PostgreSQL, Debian Linux

This role reports to:  Director of Software Engineering

This position is full-time exempt.