Upper Hand
Senior Software Engineer
Senior on-site engineer at Upper Hand (sports/fitness SaaS in Indianapolis) who leads software projects end to end — scoping, design, delivery, rollout — while writing production code in Ruby on Rails, React, Java, and PostgreSQL. Also serves as the team's AI-enablement lead, setting AI-assisted development workflows and mentoring mid-level and junior engineers.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Indianapolis, Marion County
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 2+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 6+ years building and shipping production software, including 2+ years as technical owner of projects or a team
- Proven track record leading software projects end to end (scoping, design, delivery, rollout)
- Ruby on Rails in production — owning Rails services and their data models
- React in production — component architecture, hooks, state management, front-end testing
- Java in production — modern Java with Spring or equivalent framework plus build/test tooling
- Microservice frameworks and distributed systems — service decomposition, inter-service communication, caching, queuing, consistency trade-offs
- Proven record using AI/LLM development tools to increase throughput and teaching others to do the same
- Sound judgment about AI-generated code — spotting security/performance issues and knowing when to discard it
- Strong PostgreSQL engineering — performance tuning, indexing, schema design, migrations at scale; analytics/reporting pipelines (Metabase or similar)
- Strong API design — REST and GraphQL, versioning, backward compatibility; production Node.js experience
- Hands-on GCP or equivalent cloud experience (IAM, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, BigQuery), containerized services, and CI/CD pipeline ownership
- Automated testing discipline and security-conscious engineering — OWASP, auth/authz patterns, PCI DSS or comparable regulated-data experience
- Leads through influence; coaches deliberately; executive presence; gives direct feedback; strategic thinking; culture carrier
Nice to have
- TypeScript
- Strangler Fig migration experience
- Experience leading a team through a platform migration or re-architecture, especially monolith to microservices
- Experience introducing AI tooling at an organization — standards, guardrails, or formal enablement program
- Experience in vertical SaaS or sports/fitness tech
- Contributions to technical strategy or engineering hiring
- Experience with payments or other regulated data domains
Full description
*This is an in-person role at our office in Indianapolis, Indiana. We will not consider remote candidates.*JOB SUMMARY
You lead software development projects end to end — scoping, technical design, delivery, and rollout — while writing production code across Ruby on Rails, React, and Java. You think in service boundaries, you raise the engineering bar around you, and you have made AI-assisted development a measurable advantage for your whole team, not just for yourself.
OUR STACK
Ruby on Rails · Java · React · PostgreSQL · Node.js · Microservices · Metabase · REST/GraphQL APIs · GCP · Git · CI/CD · AI-assisted development
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Lead software development projects end to end — scoping, technical design, execution, rollout, and post-launch measurement
- Own the architecture and implementation of features spanning React front ends, Rails and Java services, and PostgreSQL
- Define service boundaries, API contracts, and data models across our microservice architecture
- Serve as the team's AI-enablement lead — establish the workflows, patterns, and guardrails for AI-assisted development, and teach mid-level and junior engineers to use them well
- Mentor mid-level and junior engineers through design reviews, pairing, and 1:1 guidance
- Set coding standards, review practices, and architectural patterns across the team
- Drive PostgreSQL optimization — query tuning, indexing, partitioning, connection pooling, replication
- Own technical risk assessment and mitigation for major feature releases
- Champion observability — logging, alerting, and monitoring best practices in GCP
- Collaborate with engineering leadership on roadmap planning and capacity estimation
- Evaluate and introduce new tools, libraries, and approaches with disciplined rigor
- Participate in the on-call rotation and lead incident response
WHAT YOU BRING — TECHNICAL (ALL REQUIRED)
- 6+ years building and shipping production software, including 2+ years as the technical owner of projects or a team
- A proven track record leading software development projects end to end — scoping, design, delivery, rollout, and accountability for the outcome. Be ready to walk us through two projects you led.
- Ruby on Rails in production — you have owned Rails services and their data models, not just contributed tickets to them
- React in production — component architecture, hooks, state management, and front-end testing. TypeScript strongly preferred.
- Java in production — modern Java with Spring or an equivalent framework, plus the build and test tooling around it
- Microservice frameworks and distributed systems — service decomposition, inter-service communication, caching, queuing, and consistency trade-offs. Strangler Fig migrations a major plus.