Levelbrook — senior Ruby on Rails consulting, on contract · US-based · Pacific Time Booking new engagements · levelbrookteam@gmail.com

LevelbrookConsulting

Available · 30–40 hrs/week

Senior Ruby on Rails consulting, on contract.

Levelbrook is a US-based senior Ruby on Rails practice for teams that need a drop-in senior engineer on contract. Rails, Hotwire, PostgreSQL and AWS are the core — product features, APIs, integrations, performance fixes, and production hardening — with Python and Node.js where a mixed stack needs them. Billed corp-to-corp through Levelbrook LLC.

Negotiable · C2C Remote · Pacific Time Rails · Hotwire · Postgres AWS · APIs · Python/Node where they fit MSA / NDA / COI ready

Send a brief → How staff aug works

C2C · 1099 · contract-to-hire — Ruby on Rails is the core practice.

Pacific Time · US-based. The engineer who answers your brief is the one writing the code — billed corp-to-corp through Levelbrook LLC.

Contract-readyMSA · SOW · NDA · COI

Corp-to-corpBilled via Levelbrook LLC

One business dayEvery brief gets a reply

VMS-friendlyVendor-portal onboarding

Ways to engage

Consulting, scoped up front.

Pick the shape that matches the problem. Rails is the core of every engagement — with Python and Node available where a mixed stack calls for them — and the work is scoped around the outcome, not the hours.

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Staff augmentation

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

Embed in your sprint & standups
Rails-first · Python/Node where they fit
3–12 month engagements
Through recruiters or direct

Learn more →

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Performance & scalability

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

Query & index optimization
N+1 audits, read-replica strategy
Sidekiq pipeline rebuilds
AWS spend reductions

Learn more →

API

API & 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 — Rails-first, with Python or Node where the stack calls for it.

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

Learn more →

Selected work

Production engineering, not slideware.

A sample of real problems shipped on a multi-tenant B2B SaaS in the $5–15M ARR range. Each one is written up in full on the engineering blog.

Postgres · Scale

800M rows

Counting without melting the database

A page that counted across an 800-million-row table, fixed with the right denormalization instead of a rewrite.

Read the write-up → Rails · Performance

319 N+1s

Auditing a decade of Rails in an afternoon

Systematically surfaced 319 N+1 query sites — ~5,940ms of wasted time — and eliminated them with proper eager loading.

Read the write-up → AWS · FinOps

~60% lower

A petabyte, a bill, and a tiering decision

Cut a petabyte-scale S3 line item roughly 60% — lifecycle tiering by access pattern, no user-visible regression.

Read the write-up → Integration · AWS SES

Email-only ERP

The ERP that will only talk by email

A production integration with a legacy ERP, built on SES, a job queue, and compound indexes — fails loudly, recovers cleanly.

Read the write-up → Rails · GraphQL

REST → GraphQL

Migrating a generated admin off the rails

The hidden cost of mount Admin::Engine, and a portal rebuild on React + a versioned GraphQL API.

Read the write-up → Security · Postgres

1 commit, 6 lessons

A read follower and a credentials rebuild

A Salesforce sync, a read follower, and the audit that reshaped a whole credentials posture.

Read the write-up → Postgres · Migrations

Zero downtime

Changing a big schema while it's live

Locks, batched backfills, CONCURRENTLY, and the expand/contract dual-write dance — no maintenance window.

Read the write-up → Sidekiq · Reliability

At-least-once

Background jobs that survive a retry

Idempotency keys, dedup, and the dead set — designing a Sidekiq pipeline for the failures that actually happen.

Read the write-up → Mobile · SDUI

4 platforms

One UIConfig, four runtimes

A real server-driven UI runtime shipped on native iOS, native Android, React, and React Native from one source of truth.

Read the write-up → Rails · Support tooling

5 tables, 1 txn

The support tool that edits five tables atomically

A reparent-user workflow with a dry-run diff preview and an all-or-nothing transaction — the risky internal op, made safe.

Read the write-up → AI tooling · Process

30-eng team

Skills, not chatbots

An internal AI plugin system that put real, reviewable engineering skills in front of a thirty-person team — not another chat window.

Read the write-up →

Open source

Code you can read before you hire.

MIT-licensed tools we built and shipped in the open — a macOS voice agent and three dependency-free Ruby gems. Each one fills a real gap, ships a full test suite, and has a written engineering deep-dive. The bar we hold a public release to is the bar we hold client code to.

Featured · macOS · MIT

hey-claude

An on-device voice wake word for macOS that dispatches background coding agents — fully local until the moment of dispatch. Say "Hey Claude, <task>" and it spins up a Claude Code background agent (claude --bg); it drives any agent CLI, not just Claude.

openWakeWord (always-on, ~0.1% CPU) → energy VAD → MLX Whisper on the Apple-Silicon GPU (<1s) → dispatch
Nothing leaves the machine until an agent is dispatched
Five character voice soundpacks, configurable working directory, one-command custom packs

pipx install git+https://github.com/tachyurgy/hey-claude@v0.3.0

View on GitHub → Read the deep-dive

hey-claude — fully local until dispatch

# always-on, on-device — nothing leaves the Mac
# until an agent is actually dispatched.
wake   = openWakeWord.listen()      # ~0.1% CPU
speech = vad.capture(wake)          # energy VAD
task   = mlx_whisper.transcribe(speech)  # Apple GPU, <1s

# "Hey Claude, <task>" -> background coding agent
dispatch("claude --bg", task)

ai_stream

A pure-Ruby backend for the Vercel AI SDK Data Stream Protocol — stream text, reasoning, tool calls, and data parts to useChat / useObject from Rails or Rack. The Ruby implementation that didn't exist.

Provider-agnostic · zero dependencies
31 tests · CI on Ruby 3.0–3.4

View on GitHub →

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picoglob

Compiles bash globs — *, **, {a,b}, {1..3}, extglobs — into reusable Ruby Regexps. The missing picomatch / minimatch for Ruby: match S3 keys, routes, and log lines, not just files.

Globstar, brace ranges, extglobs, dotfile rules
Pure Ruby · 42 tests

View on GitHub →

fzy_score

A faithful Ruby port of the fzy / fzf fuzzy-matching algorithm — returns a relevance score and matched positions for highlighting. Built for command palettes, quick-open, and CLI pickers.

Score + match positions in one call
Pure Ruby · 27 tests

View on GitHub →

See all open source → Read the deep-dives

The practice

Principal-led consulting, done honestly.

Levelbrook is a senior Ruby on Rails consultant operating through an LLC — not a body shop with a bench it can't fill. Every engagement is led by the same senior engineer who answers your first email. When a project genuinely needs more hands, we bring in vetted senior engineers we've worked alongside for years, transparently, and the principal stays accountable for delivery.

6+ yrssenior backend in prod

$5–15MARR multi-tenant SaaS

1 dayto a real reply

How we engage

Low friction from brief to ship.

Brief — 30 minutes. Send the codebase shape and the problem; you get an honest read and a quote within one business day.
Trial week, optional. First week on a no-strings rolling contract. Either side can walk away. Most engagements that pass week one run 6+ months.
Async-first. Real PRs in Git, decisions written down, two recurring syncs per week max. Pacific Time with flexible overlap.
Clean paperwork. Levelbrook LLC contracts C2C — MSA, SOW, mutual NDA, and COI (GL + Professional Liability, $1M / $1M) ready on day one.

Stack

What we work with every day.

Ruby on Rails 5–8 Hotwire · Turbo · Stimulus Python · FastAPI · Django Node.js · TypeScript PostgreSQL Sidekiq Redis Elasticsearch GraphQL REST APIs AWS · S3 · RDS · Lambda · SQS · SES Docker Kubernetes OAuth · JWT · SSO React · TypeScript Express · Fastify · NestJS Cloudflare Pages / Workers Stripe

Supporting range · Python & AI

Python, where the stack calls for it.

Rails is the core practice — but plenty of Rails shops run Python alongside it, and Levelbrook ships that work directly too: FastAPI & Django backends, data pipelines & automation, and AI/LLM tooling. The proof is deployed and public — equipment-cluster, a DINOv2 → UMAP → HDBSCAN → CLIP vision-ML pipeline over 20,000+ photos, served through a React viewer.

View the live Python demo → Source on GitHub

cluster/pipeline.py — equipment-cluster

# 20k+ rental photos -> a browsable visual
# history, clustered by machine & viewpoint.
import torch, umap
from sklearn.cluster import HDBSCAN

feats  = dinov2.encode(photos)            # ViT-B/14
coords = umap.UMAP(n_neighbors=15).fit_transform(feats)
labels = HDBSCAN(min_cluster_size=12).fit_predict(coords)

# zero-shot names for each cluster via CLIP
names  = clip.zero_shot(centroids(coords, labels),
                        prompts=EQUIPMENT_VIEWS)

Supporting range · Node.js & TypeScript

Node for the APIs and integrations around the Rails core.

When a Rails engagement touches a JavaScript or TypeScript service, Levelbrook ships that too: Node.js services, REST and GraphQL APIs, OAuth/SSO, webhooks, partner integrations, worker queues, and production hardening. Same principal-led consulting model, same C2C paperwork.

Node.js development Node.js API work

services/webhooks.ts — retry-safe events

export async function deliver(event) {
  await withIdempotency(event.id, async () => {
    const res = await partner.post(event.payload)
    audit.log({ event, status: res.status })
  })
}

Available now

Need a senior Rails engineer? Let's talk.

Ruby on Rails staff augmentation, C2C consulting, APIs, integrations, and performance work — with Python and Node where they fit. Recruiters, staffing partners, direct clients, and end-clients welcome.

levelbrookteam@gmail.com Read the engineering blog