Principal Web Developer (Rails)

Job description

## About Superconductor Superconductor is building the autonomous software organization — a platform where agents don't wait for instructions, but find work everywhere: in customer emails, bug reports, session replays, Slack threads, X posts, etc. Agents that work while you sleep. We're a team of 7, backed by $7M in funding, and we intend to stay below ~25 humans hopefully forever. That means every hire matters enormously, and we compensate accordingly with highly competitive salary and equity. We have been building software together for over a decade. We formerly co-founded Gradescope, an AI-powered education grading platform used by millions of students worldwide. Previously, we were AI PhD students at UC Berkeley. All in all, we are four developers, one designer, and two generalist operators, and we all wear multiple hats every day. ## Our Values - **Customer obsession.** We see every customer interaction — every support email, every bug report, every piece of feedback — as a chance to earn trust and build something better. Customer communication is our differentiator, not overhead. - **Speed with stability.** We move fast, but we do not break things. We know that if something breaks, we're the ones fixing it — sometimes at night. We'd rather invest in getting it right the first time. - **Living in the future.** We use Superconductor to build Superconductor. We adopt our own tools before anyone else and push them until they break. If something feels like the old way of building software, we question it. - **Small team, high standards.** Every person on the team has outsized impact, outsized ownership, and outsized responsibility. ## Working at Superconductor - **Hybrid from our East Bay office:** 3 days in our easily BART-accessible office, 2 days from home. - However, our agents work 24/7, and there's real value in having humans cover the night shift. *If you are an exceptional candidate, please apply even if you're not in the Bay Area.* - **Compensation:** Highly competitive salary and meaningful equity — we're a small team that plans to stay small. - **Benefits:** Flexible PTO, parental leave, health insurance, employee-friendly equity terms, and premium equipment. - **And of course, a practically unlimited token budget!** ## The Role You are the architect, reviewer, and quality guardian for a fleet of AI coding agents. You define the patterns, enforce the standards, and review every meaningful change that ships. You are the last line of defense before code reaches production. You'll work at the intersection of deep Rails expertise and AI-augmented development, directing agents the way a senior architect directs a team — except your team never sleeps and is as good as you make it. A realistic goal: you will ship more quality code to production in your first month than you did in all of 2025. ## What You'll Do - Review code produced by AI agents for correctness, maintainability, security, and adherence to our standards - Define and evolve the application architecture, module boundaries, and system design principles that agents follow - Write architectural decision records, coding standards, and agent instructions that shape how code gets generated - See customer feedback flow directly into agent-generated tickets and code — and make sure that code is worthy of the customer who asked for it - Jump into production when things break — you've been the person on-call before and you know how to debug fast under pressure ## You Are - A VERY senior Rails developer with 10+ years of experience (ideally 15+) - Someone who loves clean code, small methods, clear naming, single responsibility, etc - Experienced deploying, operating, and being on call for at least one medium-to-large Rails application in production - Comfortable with DevOps and debugging production incidents - Excited (not threatened) by the idea that AI writes the code and you shape the outcome ## Bonus Points - Active contributor to the Rails community (conferences, gems, blog posts, open source) - Experience with React, Tailwind, Stimulus, Turbo, or Hotwire - A love of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.)