The Role This Consultant will be a key participant throughout the entire SDLC of education product. Consultant is an experienced Ruby developer who can collaborate and interact with architects, developers, and other web engineers. Consultant has a passion for end-user experience, performance, and elegance. Consultant can demonstrate a history of on-time delivery, excellent communication, and a positive, get-it-done attitude. Qualifications: -Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent -Strong object oriented analysis, design skills and data structures -Experience developing multi-threaded applications (knowledge of fundamentals of threads is assumed) -Experience developing distributed, high-performance multi-tiered applications using caching schemes like memcache and Oracle Coherence Cache -Ruby on Rails development and architecture experience  -Nginx, Mongrel, SVN, Capistrano, Memcached and other services supporting Rails -Central in the development of at least 1 ROR production system -Familiar with Maven and SVN -Applies OOD and Design Patterns to software design & problem solving -Tackled clustering/caching, threading and performance issues -Worked in a fast paced agile environment with continuous integration, unit/integration/load/performance testing -RDBMS experience including schema design and content modeling -Strong command of web standards and best practices -Strong Understanding and use of Design Patterns and enterprise integration patterns -Strong database skills including writing SQL, JDBC -Understanding of HTTP, TCP/IP and Network programming -Exposure to C/C++ programming on Unix; System Calls, memory, CPU profiling Other desirable skills include: -Unix Programming Skills and Admin Skills: Shell Scripts, Perl, awk, sed -Accountability and ownership of solutions, design, project and team success. -Experience using Eclipse, CVS/WinCVS