Engineering Manager

Riipen is North America’s largest online marketplace for experiential learning. Through short-term project-based engagements embedded directly into the existing curriculum, Riipen makes it easy for higher education institutions and industry partners to collaborate.
Riipen is looking for a Ruby on Rails Engineering Manager to join our remote Engineering team.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who enjoys both building great software and helping a team succeed. Our Engineering Managers are active contributors who write production code while also guiding their teams through planning, technical decisions, and delivery.
You might be a great fit if you have experience leading a small team, strong development experience in Ruby on Rails, and a track record of shipping high-quality web applications used by real customers. We’re looking for someone who takes ownership of their work, collaborates closely with product and design partners, and enjoys helping teammates grow while building reliable systems.
In this role you will help lead a highly effective remote team working on the Riipen platform and its supporting services. Your responsibilities will include:

• Planning and coordinating development sprints
• Collaborating with Designers and Product Managers to plan and implement features
• Writing efficient, maintainable code
• Mentoring team members and providing feedback on technical and architectural decisions
• Designing effective data models and database structures
• Participating in and facilitating code reviews
• Bringing forward ideas to continually improve our tech stack, development practices, and code quality

This role is fully remote and open to candidates in Canada.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and provide technical guidance to a small engineering team.
• Plan and coordinate development, including sprint planning, prioritization, and feature delivery.
• Collaborate with Product Managers and Designers to define requirements and deliver quality user experiences.
• Facilitate code reviews to maintain high quality.
• Work with the engineering team to deliver reliable, scalable features.
• Directly contribute to the codebase with efficient, maintainable, and well-tested code.
• Utilize Ruby, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and modern web technologies for the Riipen platform.
• Design and implement effective data models and database structures.
• Build and maintain performant APIs for the platform and integrations.
• Identify improvements for development practices, tooling, and system architecture.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

These aren’t hard requirements but will be indicators that guide our search.
You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 5+ years of experience developing Ruby on Rails applications
• Have experience leading or mentoring engineers, whether formally as a manager or informally as a technical leader
• Are comfortable balancing hands-on development with supporting and guiding a team
• Have experience with common Rails ecosystem tools such as RSpec, Simple Form, CanCanCan, Capybara, FactoryBot, or similar libraries
• Have experience designing and working with PostgreSQL or other relational databases
• Have experience working with modern CSS and JavaScript frameworks such as TailwindCSS, Turbo, Stimulus, React, or similar tools
• Care deeply about code quality, maintainability, and thoughtful engineering practices
• Enjoy working in small, collaborative remote teams
• Are comfortable prioritizing work, managing your time, and taking ownership of projects
• Have strong written and verbal communication skills, especially in distributed teams

A degree or certificate in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Software Development, or a related field is helpful, but equivalent experience is just as valuable.
Bonus Points - It’s a plus if you also have experience with:

• AWS or other cloud providers
• Hotwire Native or similar frameworks
• Mobile development
• Database performance tuning and query optimization
• AI tools that assist with software development workflows
• OpenSearch or Elasticsearch clusters
• Maintaining CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows

We ask that if you feel like you don’t check all the boxes but have the potential to learn what you don’t know, that you still apply! We believe that diverse teams are high-performing teams and we strive to employ individuals with a diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. 
If this role excites you, we look forward to receiving your application!

Benefits

• 🌐 Remote/travel working opportunities (when appropriate)
• 🏖️ 4 weeks of annual vacation 
• 🤕 Paid sick leave
• 🏥 Extended Health and Dental benefits from your first day 
• 💻 We will ensure you have a great work-from-home setup 
• 📚 Learning & Development Stipend after 6 months of employment

We appreciate your interest and application. Only those applicants under consideration will be contacted. 
Riipen is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. Employment decisions are based on merit and business needs, and not on race, colour, creed, age, sex, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, marital status, medical condition, physical or mental disability, military service, pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions or any other classification protected by federal, state or provincial and local laws and ordinances. 
Reasonable accommodation is available for qualified individuals with disabilities, upon request.

About Riipen

Conceptualized by Dana Stephenson and Dave Savory for their capstone entrepreneurship project at the University of Victoria, Riipen addressed an issue that they faced personally as learners — the challenge of gaining relevant work experience, building a network of possible employers, and then demonstrating their skills to that network in order to find work that would help them start their careers. They were facing the graduation conundrum — You can’t get a job without experience, but you can’t get experience without a job. 
Since inception in 2013, Riipen has expanded its reach internationally and has developed a state of the art technology platform that caters and provides significant competitive advantages for organizations and academic institutions while staying true to their original goal of supporting student development. Riipen has enabled 193,000+ students at 590+ post-secondary institutions and training providers to partake in applied learning with 31,000+ companies. All of this leads us to our mission: Eliminate Underemployment.