Senior Rails Programmer

37signals is hiring a Senior Rails programmer. We're accepting applications until Wednesday, April 30th at 12:00 PM CST. The salary is $201,980.

We're a small team working on Basecamp, HEY and its Calendar, ONCE, and new greenfield products at 37signals. Just ten Ruby programmers total. Doing all this product work plus a steady stream of new open source frameworks and tools. And we're now looking for a new product programmer to join the team.

Everyone says that they only "hire the best", but by definition, most of them must be full of it. Less because they're lying, more because most companies just can't discern quality. That's what happens at feature factories: endless Jira tickets flow from non-technical product managers, and shipping something, anything against that backlog is all that matters.

That's not how we work at 37signals.

We don't actually have any dedicated middle managers. The day-to-day supervision of new team members is being done by other programmers serving as mentors, and by working together with designers to ship the cycle work.

In addition, we believe in the magic of just letting Managers of One do their job through long stretches of uninterrupted time. It's incredible how much progress you can make when your calendar isn't stuffed full of pointless meetings with pointy-haired bosses, and you get to collaborate with incredibly talented, passionate people who thrive on shipping great software.

That's what we care about here: great software. That means great for everyone. Great for customers, but also great for the programmers programming it and the designers designing it. Beautiful code. Making our own tools. Compressing complexity. It quickly gets corny, but craftsmanship and care of code still does exist in this world — it's not all just AI slop.

Inspired yet? If so, here's a bit more of who we're looking for in this round: A senior product programmer with Ruby on Rails experience. Someone who can imagine themselves as a manager of one, and is comfortable working remotely. We don't put a lot of weight on educational pedigree at this end of the seniority scale, but on finding someone smart, who gets things done, and write prose and code with care and eloquence.

This role is specifically for product work. So you could be working alongside a designer on adding new features to Basecamp and HEY one cycle, then working on a brand new product in the next three. You'll dedicate time to addressing issues to make sure our apps are robust and our codebase is weed free. We also occasionally rotate people back and forth between product work and our SIP team (security/infrastructure/performance — where a lot of the open-source tool making happens).

Here are some real examples of the work the product team has done lately:

• Extending a system to move information within Basecamp to accommodate a long-requested feature.
• Collaborating with a designer to create a novel way of tracking progress in Basecamp.
• Building a system to export iCalendar feeds for calendar events.
• Diving into the RFC 5545 standard to design a system to synchronize external calendars incrementally.
• Creating a Ruby library to parse natural expressions into dates.
• Working with a designer to add more recurrence options to HEY Calendar.
• Investigating why a HEY screen presents a jumpy scroll when navigating to it.
• Troubleshooting and fixing a bug where a customer can't export emails for an Extension in HEY.
• Creating an API for Campfire that customers can use to build their own chatbots.
• Designing a Ruby gem that brings easy Web Push notification support to Rails.
• Building a feature for session transfer via QR code, so Campfire users can quickly move between devices without logging in again.

This is a remote job, but we're only looking for people based in the Americas or Europe to ensure your work day overlaps with our existing team.

We respect everyone's right to participate in political expression and activism, but avoid having political debates on our internal communication systems. 37signals as a company also does not weigh in on politics publicly, outside of topics directly related to our business. You should be at peace with both of these stances.

Pay & Benefits
37signals pays in the top 10% of the industry based on San Francisco rates. Same position, same pay, no matter where you live. The salary for Senior Programmers is 201,980 USD. Applicants from outside the US will be offered a contractor role with comparable terms and at the same rate of pay as our US-based employees.

We're hiring at the senior level because everyone starts at the senior level or below here, regardless of professional pedigree. It takes time to get up to speed, technically and culturally. If you're a fast learner and soon able to contribute at a higher level, we're quick to recognize that and promote.

Our benefits support a life well-lived away from work. We offer 31 days off per year, plus another 6-weeks every third year. We work 32-hour weeks from May 1 - August 31. After 2 years with the company, you'll be eligible for our profit sharing program. In 2025, the average bonus was 41% of base salary, with top payouts for our longest tenured employees in the six figures.

The most cherished benefit amongst current staff is that their days and their work are their own to manage. You'll be trusted to work on things that matter and have great impact. Your honed instincts and contributions will materially inform our products and how we work.

How to Apply
Please submit an application with a resumé and a cover letter that tells us about yourself, what you can bring to 37signals, and 37signals’ role in your future. Tell us about something you’ve done, something that’s relevant to the kind of work we do, something that excites you. A generic cover letter won't cut it. We want to hear your unique voice and see some creativity and effort. If it reads like AI slop, it's also going straight into the trash. We have real humans reading your application – we don't use screening software – so speak to them! Tell them why you want to be their next coworker.

If you've participated in open source work of any kind, please include links to pull requests, bug reports, feature pitches, or any other public engagement. Open-source participation is by no means a requirement, but if it's something you've done, we'd love to look at it. Likewise if you have any personal or hobby projects you've built and you'd like us to see, you can include a link to those as well.

We’re accepting applications until Wednesday, April 30th at 12:00 PM CST.

We expect to take a few weeks to review all applications. You’ll hear from us by the end of May about the status of your application. After an initial conversation with our People Ops team, we ask our candidates to complete a take-home technical exercise. The exercise is representative of the kind of day-to-day work our programmers do. We usually invite about 10 candidates to this stage, and those candidates should expect to spend 6-8 hours completing this test.

After the technical exercise, the top candidates will proceed to an interview with a couple principal members our programming team. We’ll talk through your background, your approach to work, and dive into your technical knowledge. No gotchas, brainteasers, or whiteboards.

We aim to make an offer in June with a flexible start date.

Please note that we’re unable to offer individual feedback during the screening process. We usually see 1,000+ applications for programmer roles, and our small hiring team simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to offer personalized feedback before the technical exercise round.

We look forward to hearing from you!