📋 Snapshot
See 🚩 Candidate Hard Gates & Red Flags for company-wide eligibility rules (NSFW, B2B, English, compensation-expectations screening). Location here is a role-specific exception to that page's Europe-timezone default: CET ±3 specifically.
⛔ Requirements
- Recent, hands-on production Ruby on Rails: their daily reality now, not a side project or occasional task. Agency, consulting, freelance, startup, and smaller product-company backgrounds all count equally — judge what they personally built and owned, not the size or fame of the company.
- Senior ownership and technical reasoning: built and owns their work, explains trade-offs clearly, works independently and quickly. Judged by ownership and execution, not years of experience alone.
- Independent debugging/verification discipline: can reason through and resolve issues without hand-holding.
- Europe-based, CET ±3 working-hours overlap.
- Active AI-tool usage — a hard gate, not a nice-to-have: currently uses AI development tools (e.g. Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, ChatGPT) and can inspect, correct, and explain AI-generated code, not just accept it. No AI usage at all is an immediate no.
💬 Screening Questions
- Walk me through your current role and main responsibilities, and why you're considering a move.
- What's the biggest technical challenge you faced in the last 6 months? What options did you weigh, and why did you choose that approach?
- Tell me about a time you had to debug or verify something quickly, working independently.
- Do you use AI tools in your development workflow? Which ones, and how do you verify or correct what they produce before it ships?
- What questions do you have for me?
🔎 Sourcing
Strong signals: monolithic architecture and/or scaling challenges; comfortable in a startup environment (ambiguity, fast iteration, direct communication); high-traffic B2C/SaaS exposure, broad product responsibility, scale-up experience, or strong career progression — positive signals, not automatic hard gates.
Healthcare, government, and similarly regulated or slow-moving backgrounds have historically been a weaker match for our pace — evaluate on the same ownership/depth bar above rather than rejecting by industry alone.
No approved target-company list yet. Source based on the profile above (high-traffic Ruby on Rails shops — B2C or SaaS products running Rails at real production scale). Confirm with Juan Miguel before treating any specific company list as validated. Target companies are a sourcing aid, not a qualification or rejection rule — a candidate from an agency, a consultancy, a startup, or an unlisted smaller product company is assessed on the same bar: what they personally built, owned, and can explain.
🔄 Process
Role-specific exception to the shared default (see ⏳ Hiring Process): the case study is replaced with a live coding exercise.