Location: Alabaster, AL (Birmingham area) Remote: Yes (strongly preferred) Willing to relocate: Open to discuss Resume/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WTvOBA6-ALtwNL9YXPJwu7WK... | linkedin.com/in/jamescookplease Email: jcook.rubyist at gmail dot com

I'm at my best cleaning up messes. Good fits: legacy systems nobody wants to touch, financial data that has to be right, performance work, or the quietly-expensive infrastructure everyone's been avoiding. Mostly Ruby/Rails, on systems where correctness and money matter.

What I'm strongest at:

Ruby/Rails, ~20 years, deep on the backend Database performance and correctness (Postgres/MySQL, query optimization, migrations that don't lose data) Financial and billing systems (billing/subscription integrations, cost-to-serve reporting, and keeping financial data correct across systems)

Experienced but not specialist:

AI-directed development: I use Claude every day, but I stay in charge of the design and I read everything it writes. It's wrong in predictable places, and I know where to look. Building LLM-powered features (a natural-language-to-SQL reporting tool with safe parameterization, an MCP server over real data) Infrastructure and background processing (AWS, Heroku, Cloudflare Workers, Sidekiq/GoodJob)

Dabbled, would enjoy more of:

Golang (a side project: client, background daemon, IPC), TypeScript/Preact, some C (a Ruby C-extension CSS parser)

Looking for senior backend work at a company doing durable, useful stuff, where systems judgment actually matters. Thanks for reading.