Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby on Rails + DevOps)

Are you a Senior Ruby on Rails Backend Engineer with a passion for infrastructure and DevOps, looking to join a fun, fast‑paced fintech environment?

Valiant Finance is an award‑winning FinTech startup on a mission to simplify business lending. Our cloud‑based platform helps thousands of Australian small businesses compare and apply for loans from over 80 of the country’s leading lenders. The platform not only powers our own services but also drives the commercial lending capability for some of the world’s recognised brands.

Our global Enterprise Technology arm provides embedded finance experiences and orchestration infrastructure to enterprise clients. We pride ourselves on building and delivering category‑leading tech products across the US, Australia and the UK for top‑tier global businesses. We have a strong growth agenda and are always looking for top talent to help us unleash the economic potential of every idea.

Our engineering team is remote‑friendly. Those of us who are Sydney‑based like to work from our Surry Hills office 2‑3 times a week to collaborate.

Responsibilities

• Designing and building RESTful APIs for our front‑end applications and partners.
• Integrating with external services such as Salesforce, Auth0, Cloudflare, and Mandrill.
• Architecting solutions that meet our high‑availability, security, and performance requirements.
• Building and maintaining our cloud infrastructure to support rapid growth, with an emphasis on automation, repeatability, and cost‑efficiency.
• Owning CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows to help the team ship safely and reliably.
• Managing infrastructure‑as‑code so our environments are consistent, version‑controlled, and easy to maintain.
• Improving observability across the stack – logging, metrics, alerting, and tracing – so we can catch issues before our customers notice.
• Strengthening the reliability and security posture of our systems, from incident response to proactive hardening.
• Writing well‑structured, tested, and documented code that is pleasant to maintain.
• Working closely with our Product, Design, and other teams to refine deliverables and bring new features to life.

Qualifications

• Minimum 5 years of commercial Ruby on Rails experience.
• Proven experience integrating with external APIs.
• Experience with database design and performance tuning, particularly with PostgreSQL.
• Hands‑on experience designing, deploying, and maintaining cloud infrastructure with AWS or GCP.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
• Comfort working in a Linux environment and with command‑line tools.
• Experience with testing frameworks like RSpec.
• Experience with high‑volume background job processing frameworks e.g. Sidekiq.
• Strong experience designing and maintaining both public and private REST APIs.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Bonus Skills

• Experience with infrastructure‑as‑code tools e.g. Terraform / OpenStack.
• Experience with containerisation and orchestration e.g. Docker, Kubernetes.
• Experience with observability and monitoring tooling e.g. Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana.
• Experience with security best practices (OWASP, STRIDE).
• Experience in high‑volume production environments with strict availability SLAs.
• Knowledge of the financial services industry (lending or corporate finance).
• Experience navigating GDPR and/or SOC2 regulations.

Benefits & Culture

• Remote‑friendly team, with optional hybrid working from our dog‑friendly Surry Hills office.
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave.
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