Howler

Intermediate Ruby on Rails Developer

Engineering

Full-time · Johannesburg (hybrid) · Engineering

A product engineering job, not a ticket queue.

Howler builds the technology behind live experience — ticketing, access control and cashless payments in one system, trusted across more than 20 countries and used by some of South Africa's biggest events: Ultra South Africa, Comic Con Africa, Black Coffee Weekender, MTN Bushfire. Millions of tickets, payments and check-ins move through the platform every year.

We are hiring an Intermediate Ruby on Rails Developer to build new product. You will work with Product and Design on features that customers actually touch — prototyping, shipping, iterating — on a platform that handles millions of transactions a year.

To be plain about what this role is not: it is not legacy maintenance and it is not the support queue. (We are hiring separately for a support-weighted backend seat, and that ad says so.)

The job

On any given week you might:

Build new features across our Ruby on Rails applications.
Work with Product and Design to prototype an idea quickly, then take the good version all the way to production.
Design and build the REST and GraphQL APIs behind our web and mobile platforms.
Use AI assistants to move faster through implementation — then review what they gave you properly, for correctness, performance and security.
Write clean, well-tested code, and improve what is already there through refactoring and honest optimisation.
Work with PostgreSQL, Redis and background jobs to build things that stay up under load.
Contribute to sprint planning, technical design discussions and architectural decisions — your opinion counts at this level.
Improve the CI/CD pipelines and tooling that everyone on the team lives in.
Look for places where AI can create genuine customer value in the product, not just in the IDE.

You, ideally

3–5 years of professional software development
Strong commercial Ruby on Rails, and a real grip on Rails conventions
Designing and consuming RESTful APIs
Strong SQL and PostgreSQL
Sidekiq or a similar background processing framework
Confident writing automated tests — not as an afterthought
Git and modern development workflow
Strong debugging instincts, and the patience to find the actual cause
Clear communication; you can disagree with a design and say why

AI fluency, and we mean it. At Howler this is table stakes, not a bonus line. You should already be using AI assistants — Claude, Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT or similar — in daily work: writing prompts that produce reliable engineering output, using AI for debugging, refactoring, testing, documentation and research, and validating what comes back rather than pasting it. We care far more about how effectively you use AI than which tool you happened to try.

Our stack

Backend — Ruby on Rails · PostgreSQL · Redis · Sidekiq · REST & GraphQL · OpenTelemetry · Sentry · New Relic · Datadog

Frontend — Hotwire (Turbo & Stimulus) · JavaScript · TypeScript

Infrastructure — AWS · Docker · GitHub Actions · CircleCI

AI tooling — Copilot, Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, MCP-compatible tools, LLM APIs

You do not need experience with every one of those — you do need to be interested in learning the ones you are missing.

Bonus points for AI-powered application development, LLM APIs, agents and workflow automation, MCP, prompt engineering, high-volume transactional applications, payment platforms, GraphQL, or SQL tuning.

What success looks like

Within six months you are shipping customer-facing features quickly without dropping quality, trusted across more than one area of the platform, visibly using AI to go faster and produce better code, and bringing ideas and tooling that make the whole team quicker.

Why this seat

Intermediate is the level where most developers stop being handed small pieces and start owning whole ones. Here that happens fast, because the team is small and the platform is not: real money, real concurrency, hardware at the gate that has to work without a network, and a deadline called doors open. What you ship is in front of a crowd within weeks, not quarters.