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Ably is a realtime infrastructure platform powering over 700 billion messages monthly to 2 billion devices. The company serves developers at HubSpot, Fin, Dialpad, NASCAR, Sportsbet, and General Motors.
You will own Ably's backoffice platform—the system managing every customer account, packages, entitlements, limits, and billing. This is a high-ownership role where you'll shape architecture and design rather than maintain existing decisions. You'll work closely with the Head of Infrastructure, Developer Experience team, and directly with Finance, Customer Success, and Support teams who depend on your systems daily.
Day-to-day responsibilities include:
- Running systems that hold customer packages, entitlements, limits, and billing data
- Solving problems (not just tickets) handed to you by internal stakeholders, owning both design and delivery
- Building admin tooling that lets staff manage customer accounts without needing to understand internal models
- Partnering across Finance, Customer Success, Support, and Engineering to understand processes deeply enough to question requirements
- Using AI tools (LLMs) for planning, prototyping, and code while maintaining architectural quality and correctness
- Making systems self-explanatory (e.g., why a customer has specific limits, what produced an invoice)
- Setting testing standards for systems where mistakes have financial consequences
Ably operates remote-first across the UK and Europe, with in-person company gatherings twice yearly (February and August, attendance expected). The team is ~60 people with minimal hierarchy. You'll have real autonomy and direct access to senior engineering and leadership.
The company values open sharing, empathy, continuous improvement, bias for action, dependability, and bold creativity. An AI-first engineering culture is embedded—AI tools are standard for planning and iteration, but engineers own all technical decisions and human judgment is the quality bar.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Experience working in large, established codebases with judgment to decide when to extend, rework, or replace systems
- Track record of shaping architecture within inherited systems, including data ownership decisions
- Ability to self-start, work through ambiguity, and make decisions with minimal hand-holding; comfort pushing back when process change is better than code
- AI-first mindset: seeing LLMs and AI tools as productivity multipliers and knowing where to apply rigor they cannot provide
- Experience making systems observable and testable; ability to instrument systems and set test strategies for systems with incomplete coverage
- Ruby on Rails experience helpful for understanding current codebase, but range of languages valued more than any single language
BONUS:
- Experience with usage-based billing systems (Orb, Metronome, Chargebee, or in-house)
- Background in platform or internal tooling teams (vs. product teams)
- Experience as the accountable engineer for a system subject to financial or compliance audit
