Senior Software Engineer, committed to public health, school improvement, and environmental protection


As the population rises, the climate changes, and critical resource thresholds are reached and exceeded, it’s becoming increasingly important for information systems to help us obtain and interpret data about people and organizations, in terms of both economic benefits and human and ecological health. This vision of the future is what drives us at Green River.


Incorporated in 2000, Green River is a custom web application development firm with a strong engineering focus, dedicated to social equity and environmental protection. We think of the internet as a societal nervous system—a growing global network of awareness and intelligence that we must put to good use. Helping to transform the market requires software skills, analytical experience, business sophistication, and a genuine commitment to ethics and social responsibility.


Our projects offer challenges in developing complex scalable algorithms and well-designed responsive user interfaces. We regularly evolve our approach to software development as new best practices emerge. Together, we’ve created a collaborative atmosphere in our company—shaping together the kind of work and lifestyle we want and fostering career paths through mentorship. This has resulted in exceptionally long-term relationships with both our clients and our staff.


We are a rapidly growing team of software engineers with project managers, user experience designers, graphic designers, and an office manager. Our current clients include Starbucks, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the State of Delaware, outstanding non-profit clients, the Cities of Boston and Springfield, MA, and many others. Our primary offices are in scenic Brattleboro, Vermont and we have distributed staff living and working around the country.

We are adding to our team of developers designing and building applications in Ruby on Rails. You will be working in small teams with our clients, project managers, UI/Interaction designers and front-end developers.


We are transparent with our clients—we seek candidates who can take this on wholeheartedly, and like the rest of us, care deeply about our clients’ success. Success in this position requires knowledge about the process for developing web applications, and enthusiasm about learning programming skills. We look for team members who believe in working to make the world a better place, yet bring a grounded professionalism appropriate to our clients and the scale of our projects.


What makes an engineer ‘senior’ at Green River:

  • Gathers project requirements and translating them into software specifications
  • Takes overall responsibility for the success of the project and client relationship
  • Develops high quality software that minimizes defects and maintenance costs
  • Creates and maintains momentum on a project in order to meet client goals
  • Actively participates in management of project scope, schedule, and budget


A typical day might include...

  • Lead and/or be led in small teams of developers with pull requests, code review, and staging/production deployments
  • Provide estimates, dependencies, and timing feedback in collaboration with the PM to manage schedule and budget
  • Design for and work securely with confidential data subject to HIPAA, GDPR and other regulations. e.g. encryption, audit and change logs 
  • Translate business models into designs for primary data stores, e.g: PostgreSQL, S3
  • Build intuitive UIs to apply consistent, well-validated updates
  • Learn quickly to interact with various document formats, SHP, HL7, X12 EDI, undocumented client provided data
  • Build and manage background jobs to efficiently process large datasets in a variety of formats and protocols
  • Design and maintain automated test and code quality assessments providing appropriate coverage based on risk. e.g. TravisCI minitest, rspec, Capybara, simplecov, bundleaudit
  • Provide or support non-automated workflow acceptance and user testing.
  • APIs and protocols both new and old. e.g. Oauth2, Stripe, SAP
  • Anticipate and handle unexpected inputs, race conditions, transient network errors and rate limits
  • Deploy in a variety of environments. e.g. Bare-metal, AWS EC2, Docker
  • Build intuitive search and document stores: e.g. ElasticSearch, Redis
  • Generate statistically relevant test/demo datasets: e.g. factorybot
  • Design, build, and document public-facing APIs


Some things people love about working at Green River:

  • Creative team who value a workplace where you can learn and laugh
  • Long-term relationships with smart, engaged clients


We offer a competitive salary, 100% health insurance coverage, 5 weeks paid time off, and retirement benefits.


Note: Please combine your cover letter and resume into one file and upload them when you apply for this job. A cover letter is necessary to be considered for this position.


Green River is an Equal Opportunity Employer. In accordance with our beliefs and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, Green River will not discriminate against job candidates, employees, or clients based on race, creed, color, ethnic origin, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, or disability.
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