Junior Ruby on Rails Developer

Ship things immediately in a fast growing VC-backed AI start-up, Nitrosend. Full time. Hybrid in Melbourne or Byron Bay.

The role

We're hiring our first junior developer. You'd work directly with Kam Low, our CTO, and everyone here has done this at least once already. You'd be the first person we bring in to learn it from the inside, and it's a fantastic opportunity to learn and grow with a fast scaling, venture backed start up.

What we're building

You can build an entire product by prompting Claude or Codex now. Then you get to email, and you're straight back into a dashboard from 2014: copying DNS records across by hand, dragging blocks around a template builder, clicking through six screens to schedule one send.

Nitrosend is email rebuilt for the way people actually work now. Transactional sending, campaigns, automation flows, contacts, segmentation and deliverability, all of it drivable by prompt. A customer connects Nitrosend to Claude, says "set up my sending domain, write a five email welcome series in our brand voice and send the first one to my list", and it happens in minutes. The dashboard is there when you want it, not because we force you through it.

Most email tools bolted an AI button onto a 15 year old product. We started from the assumption that an agent is the primary user and the human is approving the work.

Where we're up to

We came out of beta in June and we've been shipping hard since.

• We won Vercel Day on Product Hunt this week. Top prize went to Nitrosend for Agent Inboxes: your agent gets its own email address, so it stops borrowing yours to sign up for things and stops filling your inbox with its replies.

• We're an official app in the ChatGPT App Store, and we're live in Claude, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, Windsurf, VS Code and Zed through MCP.

• In the last few months we've shipped Agent Inboxes, multi-brand for agencies, Mailchimp and HubSpot migration, a full segment builder, live engagement scoring, 500K row imports, and a flow template library.

• Backed by Eastend Ventures and Archangel Ventures, plus a group of Australian angels.

Who we are

Three founders, all of whom have done this before. George (CEO) and Ed (COO) co-founded SmartrMail, Kam joined as CTO, and together they grew it to 12,000 customers and 6 billion emails sent before selling it in 2022. George and Ed also co-founded Bluethumb, which grew into Australia's largest online art marketplace, and ran Sendicate Newsletter Tool before that (28,000 users).

We're funded, we're small, and we're spread out across Australia. Our third rodeo. We move fast because we already know which parts of this are hard.

What you'd do

Ship real things in your first week. Some of what's on the list right now:

• Make the send path bulletproof. When someone sends an email it either lands or it tells them exactly why not. That's the whole product, and it's the most valuable work in the company.

• Build what customers ask for on calls, often the same week they ask for it.

• Work on the parts of the app people touch every day: campaign building, contact imports, automation flows, deliverability tooling.

• Build with AI in a way that scales as the team and users scale. Everyone here uses Claude Code and Codex daily. You would too.

The stack

Ruby on Rails on the backend, and it's a proper Rails app: Rails 8.1, PostgreSQL, Redis, GoodJob for background work, and a REST API that everything else is built on top of. The frontend is Vue 3 with Vite, Pinia and Tailwind. Around that sit a few TypeScript packages (our MCP server, CLI and AI SDK) and a marketing site in Astro. We deploy with Kamal onto ARM instances on AWS, with Vercel for the front ends. Sending runs through Mailgun and SES, SMS through Twilio, billing on Stripe.

You'd be hired to write Ruby. If you want to get into the rest of it, nobody will stop you.

Who we're looking for

• One to three years with Ruby on Rails. If you're a recent grad with genuinely good product instincts, apply anyway.

• Product sense. This counts as much as the code. We want someone who uses the app, spots the thing that's annoying, and fixes it without being asked twice.

• A real love of good software and good UX. You have opinions about the tools you use, and reasons behind them.

• Curious, and quick to learn. This whole industry changed shape in two years and it will do it again.

• AI-native. You build with agents every day and you're getting better at it.

• Video editing, design and content creation skills are a big bonus. We move quickly and regularly need to explain, demonstrate and launch what we're building.

Requirements

• You must be based in Australia, in either Melbourne or Byron Bay area.

• Full time. The team is based through out Australia, and we get together regularly.

Apply Now

Nitrosend it ☄️