Now Hiring

Join the Peny Team

We're a small, mission-driven team working on something that genuinely improves how communities stay informed and connected with their local governments.

About Peny

Peny is a centralized communication platform built for local governments and the people they serve. Instead of cities managing separate tools for websites, alerts, social media, documents, and resident questions, Peny brings everything together in one place.

Cities can publish updates, events, and important alerts once and know residents will actually see them through the mobile app and web platform. Residents can also ask questions through an AI-powered chat that pulls from city documents, posts, and events to provide instant AI summaries, based on only official information the city has added.

Behind the scenes, Peny helps city teams manage content, documents, approvals, and internal coordination more efficiently, reducing the number of systems they have to maintain and simplifying how information flows to the public.

We're building a more modern infrastructure layer for civic communication, designed to make local government information easier to manage, easier to find, and easier for residents to engage with.

Open Position

Software Engineer / QA

Remote 30–40 hrs/week Independent Contractor

Why We're Hiring

We've built a strong foundation for Peny and are actively refining the platform so it can be implemented more broadly in local governments. Right now, one of the biggest opportunities for us is speeding up stabilization, QA, and bug resolution so the product becomes even stronger, smoother, and more scalable.

That's why we're looking to add an independent contractor working up to 40 hours per week who can help us focus heavily on bug fixing, QA, and smart development process improvements. This role will play a big part in helping us move faster, improve product quality, and create more efficient systems for identifying and resolving issues.

Who We Want to Hire

We're looking for a mid- to senior-level Ruby developer who can take ownership of a full-time QA, bug fixing, and platform stabilization role inside Peny.

We'd be especially excited to find someone interested in the future of AI-assisted development—building AI agents, sub-agents, or automated workflows that can help streamline issue tracking, bug triage, and QA. If the idea of using tools like AI agents and cloud-based coding workflows to make development faster and smarter sounds exciting, you'll probably fit right in.

You are:

  • A strong Ruby/Rails developer with mid- to senior-level experience
  • Comfortable jumping into an existing codebase and fixing bugs efficiently
  • Detail-oriented and naturally wired for QA, testing, and product polish
  • Interested in improving systems, not just closing tickets
  • Excited by the idea of automating repetitive development workflows
  • Curious about AI agents and how they can support engineering and QA
  • Able to work independently as a contractor while collaborating closely with the team
  • Comfortable communicating in conversational English, including discussing technical concepts and development workflows with the team

What You'd Work On

In this role, you'd spend much of your time:

  • Fixing bugs and improving overall product stability
  • Supporting QA and helping create better testing processes
  • Investigating issues across the Rails app and related systems
  • Improving workflows for bug tracking and issue resolution
  • Exploring ways to automate parts of QA and bug fixing using AI agents
  • Working with the team to make development more efficient and scalable
  • Helping create a cleaner, tighter MVP experience for city users and residents

Let's Geek Out

Curious about what you'll be working with? Here's our stack:

Technologies / Frameworks

Ruby on RailsPythonPostgresRedisHotwireMinitestLangchain / LangGraphStimulusJS

DevOps

GitHub ProjectsGitHub ActionsLinearPosthogKubernetesHelmDockerClaude Code

Other Tools

RubymineSentry

AI-assisted development is a core part of our engineering culture. We expect developers to continuously refine how they use tools like Claude Code to improve speed, accuracy, and output quality.

What High Performance Looks Like

High performance in this role starts with one clear priority: make the app more stable, reliable, and polished. That means getting into the code, fixing bugs quickly, improving QA, and reducing friction across the platform. If the app is not stable, nothing else matters.

But we're also thinking bigger. We want to build a development system that can scale without adding headcount at the same pace—using AI, automation, and smarter workflows to speed up triage, QA, debugging, and issue resolution.

At a high level, success looks like:

A more stable app, faster bug resolution, smarter QA, more automation, and a development engine that can scale far beyond a traditional team of the same size.

When & Where You'd Work

As an independent contractor, we're all about flexibility. Work wherever you'd like—home, co-working space, coffee shop—as long as you have solid internet and can hop on calls when needed.

Hours

30–40 hours per week

Location

Fully remote, anywhere

Meetings

Short standups as needed

Benefits

While we don't offer an office kegerator or ping-pong tables, we do provide:

Competitive Hourly Rate

We believe in paying top talent what they're worth.

Flexible Hours & Location

Work wherever you're most productive—home, co-working, coffee shop.

Collaborative Culture

A small, supportive team that celebrates wins big and small.

Meaningful Impact

Your work directly helps local governments and residents communicate better.

You'll also enjoy fun perks like shoutouts, surprise company gifts, and the occasional themed Slack celebration. We're big on supporting you and the life you live outside your GitHub commits.

Ready to Join the Peny Team?

If you've read this far, you're probably as stoked about civic tech innovation as we are.

In your application, tell us how you currently use AI tools like Claude Code in your workflow. Bonus points for a concrete example!