Overview
We’re looking for a curious, rigorous, problem-hungry platform engineer (who codes!) to carry the ball as we bring Ashby to the big leagues. Ashby builds software that lets talent teams build an efficient, delightful, respectful hiring process. You’re an engineer who wants to build a “paved road” that excellent engineering teams can safely take to scale.
We have notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. Our growth and retention metrics are best-in-class among our peers: we have tens of millions in ARR, growing >100% year over year, over 2500 customers, very low churn, and many years of runway. We’ll share more details once we meet, but you now probably have a good idea as to why we’re hiring for this role.
We’ve listed this role twice: as a Platform Engineer and Site Reliability Engineer – our team does both, and we are open to candidates who lean towards one or the other.
About the role and how we work
Hi, I’m Colin, Head of EMEA Engineering. I’ve spent a number of years leading engineering teams in startups, and that has always included being close to infrastructure teams – no matter what name they’ve worn (SRE, infrastructure, platform, etc). I’ve built the initial infrastructure for startups and know the value a talented infrastructure engineer brings. The rigor, the discipline, and the peace and quiet when everything hums along are what we aim for at Ashby.
Our infrastructure is in a good place for now. Nothing is static. Ashby continues to grow rapidly, putting strain on our existing infrastructure. We’re always looking to give our customers more powerful hiring software, and building new product features often requires new pieces of infrastructure.
Having managed many complex systems, I’ve learned there’s a better way. I (and Ashby) place a lot of value on infrastructure-as-code. As a Platform Engineer at Ashby, you’ll dive into scaling problems, add new capabilities to our platform, and think about how our entire team interacts with infrastructure. All our own engineers own their projects end-to-end and ship with minimal oversight. We don’t put roadblocks to ensure security when common sense will do and we don’t build processes around the lowest common denominator. But with great power comes great responsibility: we handle personal and confidential data about some of the biggest decisions we make at work. As we grow, more and bigger customers rely on us to be reliable and secure, and how we operate internally will need to evolve.
We’re at an inflection point where our ability to scale and deliver a seamless experience has a make-or-break impact – we have some of the fastest growing companies using our platform every day to hire hundreds of people per month. We need someone like you to make good decisions, debug thorny issues, and build a future-proof platform that can withstand this scale. Our small but mighty infrastructure team has set up a secure and simple environment (we don’t believe in spinning up a new service unless necessary) for our growing product team to build in. That’s where you come in: you, too, will own projects end-to-end and have an impact on core parts of the Ashby developer and user experience. For instance, you could work on:
Responsibilities
* Optimize our homegrown ultra-dynamic recruiting DSL-to-SQL compiler and create tools to help developers do so
* Create automated guardrails for the security and privacy of our customer data
* Help our developers ship features fast through canary deploys, gradual rollouts and feature flags, while keeping complexity manageable and reducing downtime
* Work with the business and the engineering team to define SLOs and implement the corresponding SLIs
* Ensure all communication with external services supports retries and circuit-breakers
* Implement the infrastructure to support an event-driven architecture and data warehouse
We’re looking for someone who can build systems that a engineer would like to work with: mature and boring but open-minded and approachable. We have to balance reliability with flexibility. Software and its availability are now mission critical to almost every working professional. To be in an SRE in today’s world, you have to be extremely comfortable evaluating risk, both your own and others’.
Why you should or shouldn’t apply
You should apply if:
* You never stop. You get weirdly obsessed about a problem that doesn’t yet make sense, turn it every which way in your head until the explanation dawns. You’ll search every rock and inventory every clue, hunting every mismatch. We’ll be armed with state-of-the-art monitoring tools and data, and join you in the adventure.
* You don’t take shortcuts. You speak up for the future user, the edge case, and the doomsday design. You know product engineers want to build it with you and see them as allies, where you give them the power and knowledge to access greater things.
* You care about what you do and the team you do it with, and want to work with others who do as well. You’ll be on interview panels choosing your next colleagues and you’ll take that seriously. You only want to work with people who make you better, and want to make you better.
* You’ve built infrastructure at a slightly later stage than Ashby is at – you know how to deal with millions of data points, have seen good (or not-so-good) infrastructure impact customer experience, and have automated provisioning, monitoring, and release processes.
* You’re a Swiss army knife (all nationalities welcome). You’ll get every hard problem the company faces and do infrastructure updates, security hardening, database optimization, Kubernetes debugging, and tracing TypeScript issues. You probably don’t feel like an expert at all of these, and that appeals to you.
All that makes for a pretty specific kind of role, and the job isn’t for everyone. You should not apply if:
* You don’t want to make your own decisions on what is the best paved road to build for Ashby. Our leads and managers provide feedback, but you ship what you want to build and are accountable for it.
* You hate SQL. We have a lot of features built around making the best out of data, and our platform engineers sometimes dive into a gnarly report or advise on a more performant data model.
* You don’t want to code. Our SREs are software engineers and are responsible for the application, including reviewing and submitting code changes.
* Your primary mode of communicating best practices is live meetings. We are async and written communication is essential; you will need to share tooling and best practices with engineers quickly.
* You’ve never delivered a project on your own without someone prodding you for updates. We have no delivery managers, but you must manage your project, seek help when needed, and scope appropriately.
Technology Stack
We use TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, Redis. We use Datadog and Sentry on 100% cloud-based AWS infra. We take developer experience and reliability seriously: all engineers are on call in a follow-the-sun model, and everyone contributes to developer tooling.
What We’re Building
As engineers, we are used to tooling that makes us better at what we do. When we started Ashby, we saw the opposite with TA software. We built and continue to build Ashby to give TA teams the highest standard of tooling—software that’s intelligent and powerful, with insights and automation to reduce manual effort.
Scheduling a final round is a good example: recruiting teams wanted faster scheduling, better interviewer alignment, and capacity-aware planning. We built software to support that vision.
Engineering Culture
Our engineering culture is shaped by our co-founders and their belief that a small, talented team can build high-quality software fast with regular hours. We emphasize:
* Minimal process with ownership over decisions normally made by product and design
* Natural collaboration and deliberate communication
* Investing in tooling and abstractions for leverage
* Diversity and inclusion
Minimal Process & Lots of Ownership
The best engineers deliver reliably magical outcomes with minimal oversight while stakeholders stay informed. We value ownership over process and empower engineers to ship what they build.
Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate
Our engineers are lifelong learners who are humble and kind. We emphasize thoughtful, written communication and asynchronous collaboration.
Increase Leverage, not Team Size
We’ve built Ashby with strong developer tooling and reusable building blocks (analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) to enable fast, safe, and flexible product development.
Put Effort into Diversity
We’re committed to diversity and inclusion, with ongoing efforts to improve representation and opportunities for engineers from underrepresented groups. Ashby’s current representation includes 21% engineers from underrepresented groups, with steps to improve via diverse hiring practices and inclusive policies.
Interview Process
Our interview process is designed to help you show your best self. We’ll dive into past projects, pair programming, and collaborative work on product and tech specs. There are no LeetCode or whiteboard exercises.
Our interview rounds are:
1. Introduction call with Hiring Manager (15 to 30 min, live)
2. A technical screen where we pair in our actual codebase (1 hr, live)
3. Three non-coding interviews focusing on technical design, debugging incidents, and infrastructure (3 hr 15 min, live; can be split across days)
Depending on leadership bandwidth, there may be an additional 30 min screen with a recruiter. Your hiring manager will be your main point of contact and will prep you for interviews. Each round will have written guidance so you know what to expect (minimal preparation). You’ll meet 4 to 6 people in engineering and have 5–15 minutes per interviewer to ask questions. If we don’t give an offer, we’ll provide feedback.
Your First Three Months at Ashby
We want an exceptional onboarding experience. Your dev environment will be set up with a single script, you’ll push your first product change on day one, and you’ll spend the rest of your time shipping changes that familiarize you with our codebase and practices. Reviews at 30, 60, and 90 days help calibrate on how we work together.
You’ll be paired with a teammate for questions and pair programming. The team will run training on culture, product, engineering process, and technical architecture.
Benefits
* Competitive salary and equity.
* 10-year exercise window for stock options.
* Unlimited PTO, with encouragement to take it.
* A minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, with regional variations as required.
* Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget.
* $100/month education budget, with approval for larger items.
* Health insurance details depend on location, with Ashby covering premiums where applicable.
Ashby’s success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, challenged, and do our best work. We’re deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. We invite you to apply.
Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.
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