Senior Ruby Developer

Senior Ruby Developer qualifications to look for

A Ruby developer builds anything from the backend of a web application to command-line utilities using Ruby language.

Your top Senior Ruby Developer has extensive experience developing back-end components, connecting the application to other third-party web services, and supporting the front-end developers by integrating their work with the Ruby application.

Keep an eye out for candidates who have:

• Excellent communication skills
• A team-playing attitude
• The drive to constantly learn 
• An understanding of basic algorithmic concepts
• A wide understanding of databases
  

Though a degree seems attractive, this position is more about how voracious a learner your Senior Ruby Developer is. 

Your best candidates will participate in hackathons, be active in tech forums, and have a strong interest in learning the latest technologies. 

Top tip: Hire candidates willing to grow by making sure their personal career goals align with your company's mission.

Role-specific interview questions

• When is the best time to set up its test infrastructure in a project’s lifecycle?
• What are you looking for in a regression test suite?
• Explain whether arguments in Ruby get passed by reference or by value.
• Describe the tools and processes you use for linting, debugging and profiling.
• If Ruby MRI uses a Global Interpreter Lock. Does this mean it uses real threads?
• Using pseudo-code, reverse a String iteratively and recursively
• Is it possible to have a producer thread reading from the network and a consumer thread writing to a file, really work in parallel? What about the GIL?
• Describe how the generational garbage collection introduced in Ruby 2.1 works. How was it an improvement over the last version? 
• Write a single line of Ruby code that prints the Fibonacci sequence of any length as an array.
• Describe what makes a good unit test. What makes a functional one?
• What are the core principles of a REST API and RPC?
• Explain in simple terms Lambda expression forms a closure.
• Explain the difference between a block different and a Proc.