Available for new engagements · 30–40 hrs/week

Senior Rails & AWS engineering, on contract.

A Pacific-Northwest engineering practice for Rails + Postgres SaaS teams. We ship features, fix the hard production problems, and own the parts of the stack the rest of the team would rather not — quietly, on schedule, billed corp-to-corp.

$110/hr · C2C Remote · PT 6+ years senior US-based · LLC
C2C · W2-hourly · 1099 · MSA / NDA / COI ready

One of two backend engineers on a multi-tenant SaaS that grew from $4M to $13M ARR. Six years owning Rails, Postgres, AWS, and the production problems that don't fit on a Jira ticket.

Levelbrook Consulting · Principal engineer
Same team that builds and runs levelbrook.com end-to-end
Three engagement shapes

Scoped up front. No surprise bills.

Pick the shape that matches the problem. Each one is built around the way Rails / AWS work actually breaks down — not generic "consulting hours."

Drop-in senior backend

A drop-in seat on your Rails team. We pick up tickets, ship features, review PRs, and carry pager weight — same as a full-time senior, just on a contract.

  • Rails feature work & PR review
  • API design (REST + GraphQL)
  • Background jobs & Sidekiq
  • 3–12 month engagements
🔧

Performance & scalability work

Slow queries, noisy-neighbor problems, a Postgres that's outgrown itself, an S3 bill that's outgrown the company. We diagnose, then fix.

  • Query & index optimization
  • RDS read-replica strategy
  • Background pipeline rebuilds
  • AWS spend reductions (S3 / RDS)
🏗️

Platform & integration builds

A real REST/GraphQL API for your customers, a third-party data import that has to actually work, an OAuth/SSO story that holds up to security review.

  • Public API design & rollout
  • Third-party data integrations
  • OAuth / JWT / SSO
  • Audit-grade logging
How we engage

A small practice. No junior hand-offs.

Every engagement is led by the same senior engineer who answers the first email. You get real PRs, written-down decisions, and a clean exit when the work is done.

Brief — 30 minutes

We'd rather find out fast whether the work is a fit. Send a description of the codebase and the problem; you get an honest read and a quote within 24 hours.

Trial week (optional)

First week is on a no-strings rolling contract. Either side can walk away with no penalty. Most engagements that go past week one run 6+ months.

Async-first

Real PRs in Git. Decisions written down. Two recurring sync meetings per week max. We work on PT but overlap is flexible.

Clean paperwork

Levelbrook LLC contracts C2C. MSA, SOW, mutual NDA, and COI (GL + Professional Liability, $1M / $1M) ready on day one. Vendor-management-system onboarding included.

Stack

What we work with every day.

Ruby on Rails 5–7 PostgreSQL Sidekiq Redis Elasticsearch GraphQL REST APIs AWS · S3 · RDS · Lambda · SQS · SES Docker Kubernetes OAuth · JWT · SSO React · TypeScript Python Cloudflare Pages / Workers Stripe Twilio
Writing · 13 essays

Field notes from real production work.

War stories and architectural decisions from the kind of work we actually do — Rails & Postgres at scale, AWS bills that grew teeth, AI tooling that earns its keep, integrations with software that predates HTTPS.

Browse all 13 essays →
Available now

Have a Rails problem you'd rather not own? Hand it over.

Recruiters and staffing partners welcome. Direct clients welcome. End-clients welcome. We respond to every brief inside one business day.