Senior Software Engineer

About the Company

Bonterra

Are you a passionate innovator looking to harness the power of technology to do more good At Bonterra, our purpose is to power those who power social impact — the doers behind the scenes across nonprofits, public agencies, corporations, philanthropic organizations, and foundations. As the second largest and fastest-growing social good software company in the world, we build the fundraising and engagement tools nonprofits rely on: online giving portals, donor management, and auction platforms.

About the Role

Senior Software Engineer

We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer to work broadly across our Rails application suite — not a single-initiative hire, but someone who'll move across the codebase as priorities shift, own features end-to-end, and help set technical direction as we modernize. This is a product engineering role. You'll partner directly with Product and Design to take a problem from technical discovery through delivery — scoping the approach, surfacing tradeoffs, making the call when things are ambiguous, and following through to a shipped, monitored feature. We're not looking for someone who waits to be told what to build.

Responsibilities

• Own features end-to-end across our Rails applications (PostgreSQL, MySQL) Java/C#/Python (Preferred -Ruby on Rails) serving donors, nonprofits, and platform administrators — from technical discovery and scoping through implementation, rollout, and monitoring.
• Work with a layered frontend: React for stateful UI, Stimulus for behavior on server rendered HTML, Turbo for partial updates, Action Cable for real-time features.
• Design and tune asynchronous workflows via Sidekiq across prioritized queues, with CloudWatch instrumentation.
• Participate in ongoing platform modernization — dependency and framework upgrades, migration off legacy patterns, and paying down debt deliberately rather than reflexively.
• Use AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) as a standard part of your workflow — not just for autocomplete, but for accelerating discovery, testing, and review — while maintaining a critical eye on what they produce.
• Write RSpec/Capybara system specs and Jest unit tests and own the full quality surface: N+1 detection, dependency/security scanning, and safe migrations (Strong Migrations).
• Ship and deploy via Capistrano across staged environments (dev → beta → demo → staging → production).
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, and DevOps — including communicating tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders and driving alignment on architectural decisions rather than deciding in isolation.

Qualifications

• Have 5+ years of Java/C#/Python (Preferred -Ruby on Rails) experience, including work across the full request lifecycle — schema design to rendered HTML to async job.

Required Skills

• Default to ownership. You can take a loosely-defined problem, resolve the ambiguity yourself, and drive it to done — pulling in the right people rather than waiting for direction.
• Are AI-forward. You use AI tools daily in your engineering work and have opinions on where they help and where they don't — you're not a skeptic by default, but you're also not uncritical of the output.
• Have 5+ years of Java/C#/Python (Preferred -Ruby on Rails) experience, including work across the full request lifecycle — schema design to rendered HTML to async job.
• Have navigated real technical tradeoffs (simplicity vs. performance, shipping vs. tech debt) and can explain the reasoning, not just the decision.
• Bring a strong testing instinct — you write specs before and after, not as an afterthought.
• Are comfortable with AWS (S3, EC2, SNS, Lambda) in a Rails deployment context.

Preferred Skills

• Have experience with payment processing or other financially sensitive integrations (bonus).

Equal Opportunity Statement

Not specified.

Additional Information

You'd Be a Strong Fit If You:

• Default to ownership. You can take a loosely-defined problem, resolve the ambiguity yourself, and drive it to done — pulling in the right people rather than waiting for direction.
• Are AI-forward. You use AI tools daily in your engineering work and have opinions on where they help and where they don't — you're not a skeptic by default, but you're also not uncritical of the output.
• Have 5+ years of Java/C#/Python (Preferred -Ruby on Rails), including work across the full request lifecycle — schema design to rendered HTML to async job.
• Have navigated real technical tradeoffs (simplicity vs. performance, shipping vs. tech debt) and can explain the reasoning, not just the decision.
• Bring a strong testing instinct — you write specs before and after, not as an afterthought.
• Have experience with payment processing or other financially sensitive integrations (bonus).
• Are comfortable with AWS (S3, EC2, SNS, Lambda) in a Rails deployment context.

How We Evaluate

Our interview process weighs how you make decisions as much as what you know: testing philosophy, architectural tradeoffs, data/caching problems, code review approach, and debt management — always probing for ownership, communication, and AI usage along the way. If you're someone who needs a fully specified ticket to make progress, this probably isn't the right fit; if you're someone who pushes back on bad assumptions and proposes alternatives, it probably is.