sierra-studio - Backend Engineer (Ruby on Rails / PostgreSQL / LLM Pipelines), Product Testing Data

• Experienced backend engineer (4+ YOE) with strong proficiency in Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL. Rails is strongly preferred given the existing ecosystem, though a genuinely exceptional backend engineer from another stack is worth a conversation • Real experience with data modeling — you've designed schemas that had to survive changing product requirements, and you can walk through the trade-offs you made and what you'd do differently • Experience building or maintaining data ingestion pipelines from messy external sources: documents, third-party feeds, vendor exports, anything you don't control the format of • Analytical rigor. You don't need to be a data scientist or a statistician. The bar is that you reason well with data: you can look at a result and say whether there's enough there for a customer to act on, and you're comfortable saying "not yet" when there isn't. Think strong data analyst instinct, applied by an engineer • Comfort building on LLM / agentic APIs in production: pipeline design, evaluation, and handling non-deterministic output responsibly • Experience with analytical data stores (ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake, DuckDB or similar) — strong plus • Familiarity with Turbo (Hotwire) and Tailwind — nice to have, not a filter • Bias to action — this is early stage, 0 to 1 execution • Excellent communication, comfortable working autonomously and seeing the big picture • Previous experience as a developer in high-growth startups • Mission alignment matters here: this team cares about transparency in what people buy and consume, and they hire for people who care about it too • First Principles • Deal with ambiguity, deconstruct the problem, build the optimal solution • Question every requirement → delete any part or process you can → simplify and optimize → accelerate cycle time → automate • Standard of Excellence • High standards are contagious. A+ talent attracts A+ talent • There's a glut of mediocrity in the world. They're chasing the products and the people that strive for excellence • Bias for Action • Take initiative, decide quickly, experiment, and learn from failures • Customer expectations rise over time, which means improving every single day • Coachability. It's not about being right, it's about getting to the right answer • Reacts calmly to criticism, and treats feedback as information rather than a threat • Respectfully challenges decisions you disagree with, even when it's uncomfortable — and once a decision is made, commits fully and moves forward