Ruby Systems Developer

About Harvest!

Harvest is one of the earliest Rails applications designed for businesses. We took a rather boring and painful problem — time tracking — and applied our expertise in design & technology. We're trying to make time tracking enjoyable and possibly even sexy.

We started as a team of 3 (using Rails 0.14.1) and today we're a team of 22 serving thousands of customers from over 150 countries (and, yes, we're now on Rails 3). We're a small, profitable, and growing business that is completely self-funded.

Read about Harvest's development process

Who You Are

• Stats and metrics are sexy to you.
• You don't fear making changes to production systems.
• You're prepared to be the on-call engineer and to develop systems tools to reduce the frequency that you get paged.
• You have used tools like Chef, Puppet or Cfengine in the past and understand the need for them.
• You understand how to make use of platforms such as Amazon AWS, Rackspace Cloud, Heroku, etc.
• You want to be part of a small, growing company that is making an impact on the workflow and efficiency of small businesses.

Sample of Things You Might Work On

We can't predict the future, so we'll just list out a few things that we did in the past few weeks, and things we would've done if you were here.

• Refactor Rails code to be faster and more efficient.
• Troubleshoot the cause of a production Rails bug from an exception report, understand the problem, and deploy a fix.
• Write Chef recipes to deploy new production software or update existing software.
• Deploy new servers when the time comes to add more resources.
• Improve on tools our team uses every day, like Lumberjack, our internally written log search tool.
• Understand which metrics are critical to track and devise new tools to track them.
• Create new libraries to replace those you find lacking.

To Apply

• Email us at with the subject "Harvest Systems Dev".
• Tell us why you want to work with us.
• Tell us why we should hire you.
• Send along your resume (or, if you don't have one, tell us what you've been working on for the past few years of your life).
• Link to your GitHub account and your own Ruby projects.
• One more thing. Give us your thoughts on this question: Everyone talks about Cloud Computing and NoSQL these days. Pick either Cloud Computing or NoSQL and let us know what [Cloud Computing|NoSQL] means to you and in what scenarios [Cloud Computing|NoSQL] make sense.