Staff Software Engineer Product Engineering, EMEA
Offer summary
Qualifications:
Proficiency in full-stack development, including frontend and backend technologies., Experience with product design, specifications, and end-to-end project ownership., Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work with ambiguous requirements., Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field is preferred..Key responsibilities:
- Design and build features that solve customer problems.
- Take ownership of large portions of products from conception to deployment.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define and implement solutions.
- Research competitors and write product specifications.
Job description
Hi đđŸ Iâm Abhik, Ashbys CoFounder and VP of Engineering. Weâre looking for an ambitious fullstack engineer who is laserfocused on solving customer problems and making the right longterm investments to solve them not only today but in our future features and products.
About the Role and How We WorkOur engineering culture strives to recreate the environments where we did our best work as ICs â where we had the ownership and agency to impact our users with creative and innovative software.
I started my career building software for artists in the Visual Effects industry. It was a formative experience for me as a software engineer because success relied on my ability to be a product manager and designer. I talked to artists to understand their needs. I came up with ideas. I did industry research, designed interfaces, and prototyped ideas. I watched artists use what I built and decided what to tackle in the next iteration. No daily standups, no tshirt sizing, no planning meetings.
I studied computer science to solve problems, not tickets, and this felt exactly like that. I not only felt creative and fulfilled but the agency and ownership we were given as engineers powered an incredible amount of innovation.
Innovation came differently (or not at all) at technology startups beyond the seed stage, often through an engineerâs force of will and ability to push back against culture (rather than any encouragement from it). Engineering was narrowed to implementation and delivery, partly due to the influence of other departments and partly due to the influx of Agile processes like sprint planning. In those companies, I felt like a JIRA jockey.
At Ashby, weâre building an environment that is optimistic about what engineers can own and achieve. An environment that embraces innovative engineers, and, frankly, often stays out of their way. As a Product Engineer, youâll take ownership over a large portion of one of our products and own projects endtoend (wearing hats traditionally worn by product and design). Youâll research competitors, write product specs, make wireframes, and more. To ground it with examples, product engineers at Ashby have:
Designed and built automated interview scheduling. This feature automates scheduling by calculating possible times from a pool of interviewers and other constraints, and then presenting these times to the candidate for selection via our responsive web app. This solves the âCalendar Tetrisâ problem I talk about in What Were Building.
Built a generalized declarative filter architecture that allows users to create complex filters for any record with a consistent UI and compile it to SQL in our backend. Many userfacing features use it.
Specced, designed, and implemented a feature that allows users to complete signing offers entirely within Ashby. This project involved talking to customers to understand their requirements, deciding what technologies to use, building a prototype, and working with other team members to integrate the final implementation into additional features.
Why You Should or Shouldnât ApplySoftware engineers come in many flavors, not all of which fit our model. Here are some things to help you decide if this fits you and what youâre looking for:
Youâre not afraid to tackle any part of a technology stack. You do whatâs necessary to successfully deliver a feature, whether writing frontend or choosing new infrastructure. Weâll provide a supportive environment to do it successfully (e.g., design system, SRE team).
Youâve tackled projects with a lot of product and technical ambiguity, and you thrive at the intersection of the two. Weâre not building a simple CRUD app, and many of the challenges we tackle require you to use your knowledge of our customers to build powerful abstractions and flexibility in the system to solve a class of problems.
You know how to strike the right balance between speed and quality. Ashby wasnât built quickly. We took four years to launch publicly because convincing customers to switch required a highquality product. However, time isnât infinite, especially for a startup, so we still move with urgencyâweâve built the equivalent of three or more VCbacked startups with a very small team.
You are ambitious and always looking to improve your skills. For most engineers, this role will give you more freedom and responsibilities than youâve experienced in the past. To thrive (and level up), youâll need to be open to feedback (and we give lots of it).
Youâre an excellent collaborator and communicator. Ownership and freedom donât mean you work in a vacuum. Youâll need to vet your decisions with the appropriate stakeholders, keep them up to date when necessary, and work with other engineers to get your projects across the finish line. Clear and concise communication helps a lot here!
You seek to create leverage in your work. The nature of software is that you can often automate or abstract what would be tedious, timeconsuming work. Your impatience usually leads to new abstractions, tools to allow Support to debug before Engineering, new lint rules to prevent common bugs, etc.
Put another way, you shouldnât apply if:
You need companydriven process and structure to get your projects across the finish line. Sprint planning and welldefined project management processes are things you need or look to others to lead. Youâd rather focus on the technical details and challenges.
You only want to do exciting work. Weâre building a team of kind, collaborative folks. Customer issues and investigations are distributed across the team, including our highlevel ICs.
You can get lost in the details. Once you start implementation, it can be hard to take a step back and think about the project as a whole. You like everything to be planned upfront.
You havenât led or taken ownership of projects before. Youâre used to working with tech leads and taking on tasks distributed by them.
You want to mentor earliercareer engineers. We rely on engineers owning their projects, so we need engineers with that experience. This requires the team to be reasonably tenured. More than 90% of the team would be considered Senior or above in the industry today, so mentorship opportunities are very limited.
To you, a tech lead, staff, or principal engineer is someone who spends most of their time project managing or doing architecture reviews. Our most tenured engineers spend most of their time building, and we often trust them with our most challenging problems. While they lead product and technical areas and help other engineers plan their most challenging work, itâs not a requirement, nor do engineers need their signoff.
Engineering CultureOur engineering culture is motivated by Benjiâs (my Cofounder and CEO) and my belief that a small, talented team, given the right environment, can build highquality software fast (and work regular hours!). We do it through:
Minimal process with ownership over decisions normally made by product and design
Natural collaboration and deliberate communication
Investing in tools and abstractions that give us leverage
Putting effort into building a diverse team
Minimal Process & Lots of OwnershipThe best engineers weâve worked with delivered reliably magical outcomes. They took customer problems and relentlessly drove them to solutions that were not only successful but often brilliant and creative. While they did this with minimal oversight, stakeholders were never in the dark as to what was going on, and no setback was a surprise.
Traditional productdevelopment processes arenât meant for the best engineers. Their purpose is to create consistent outcomes regardless of the engineerâs skill. But, consistency comes at the expense of an engineerâs time and freedomâboth ingredients necessary to generate those magical outcomes. As a result, process stifles the best engineers and doesnât give others the opportunity to practice the behaviors that made the best engineers the âbest.â
At Ashby, we want to build an environment that encourages every engineer to be their best. So, at Ashby, every Engineer runs their project. Product Managers (and Designers) build strategy, do customer research, and hand off problem briefs to Engineers. Engineers take on the rest: they research the problem, write product specs, build wireframes, and implement their solution endtoend. We rely on engineers, not process, to push information outward to the relevant folks (e.g., Product Managers) and pull folks in to help (e.g., Designers, Infra). Itâs a new level of ownership for many engineers, but weâd rather an engineer fail a bit and coach up their skills than use process as a crutch. Not everyone succeeds in our culture, but those who do thrive.
Collaboration is Natural & Communication is DeliberateOur engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind (meet them here!). These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally. We combine this with research, prototyping, and written proposals to see around corners and get feedback from the team across time zones. Focus time is something that we hold sacred, and, with thoughtful and deliberate communication, engineers are in <2h meetings per week (I wrote about it here).
To drive it home, heres a recent calendar of an engineer who has been with us for over 4 years:
We also meet in person at least twice a year, once as a department and once as a company. You also have a small budget to meet up with folks in your cityregion.
Increase Leverage, not Team SizeWe built Ashby with the quality, breadth, and depth that many customers would expect from much larger teams over larger time scales. Weâve done this through investment in:
Great developer tooling. Our CICD takes ~10m, and we deploy at least 15x a day. A debugger that works out of the box. Everyone on the team has contributed to our developer experience đȘđŸ.
Building blocks to create powerful and customizable products fast. At the core of Ashby is a set of common components (analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) that we constantly improve. Each improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app (short video below).
Hereâs an impromptu quote from Arjun in our company Slack of what itâs like to build a feature at Ashby:
And a demo of one of these building blocks:
Put Effort into DiversityDiverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Having seen my mother and partner build their careers as minority women in nondiverse fields, I want to make sure Ashby creates opportunities for the next generation of engineers from underrepresented groups.
Today, 21% of engineers at Ashby are from underrepresented groups. Itâs not great, and we are taking conscious steps to improve, like sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, no leetcode interviews, and more.
Interview ProcessAt Ashby, our team and interview process want to help you show your best self. Weâll dive into past projects and simulate working together via pair programming, writing product and tech specs collaboratively, and talking through decisions. There are no leetcode or whiteboard exercises.
Our interview process is three rounds:
Introduction call with Hiring Manager (15 to 30m, live)
A technical screen where we pair in our actual codebase (1h, live)
Three noncoding interviews that focus on product thinking, technical design, and infrastructure (3h 15m, live can be split across multiple days)
Depending on our leadership teamâs bandwidth, we may start with an additional 30m screen with a recruiter.
Your hiring manager will be your main point of contact and prep you for interviews. Each round will have written guidance so you know what to expect (youâll need minimal preparation). Youâll meet 4 to 6 people in engineering (with 515 minutes in each interview to ask them questions). If we donât give an offer, weâll provide feedback!
Your First Three Months at AshbyWe want an exceptional onboarding experience for every new hire. At Ashby, your dev environment is set up with a single script, you push your first product change on day one, and you spend the rest of your time shipping product changes that give you a tour of our codebase and best practices. The product changes increase in scope and ambiguity from simple copy changes to the delivery of a prominent, impactful feature. Your manager will do a 30, 60, and 90day review to give feedback and calibrate on how we work together.
Itâs a team effort to get you successfully onboarded; youâll have a peer paired with you to answer questions, pair program, and check in often to see if you need help. The rest of the team will run training sessions on our culture, product, engineering process, and technical architecture.
Technology StackIâm sharing our tech stack with the caveat that we donât require previous experience in it (but a love of typed languages is helpful đ): TypeScript (frontend & backend), React, GraphQL API, Node.js, Postgres, Redis.
When they joined Ashby, many of our engineers switched from other languages like Swift and Kotlin (Ben), platforms like iOS (Tom) and Windows (Sergey). We care more about fundamentals (e.g., debugging, abstractions) and how fast you learn. For folks on the team who switched, its nice seeing changes hot reload versus waiting for XCode to compile đ
.
BenefitsCompetitive salary and equity.
10year exercise window for stock options. You shouldnât feel pressure to purchase stock options if you leave Ashby âdo it when you feel financially comfortable.
Unlimited PTO, and we will encourage you to take it.
A minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, covered by Ashby. For folks outside the US, it may be longer to be in line with regional requirements.
Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. Get what you need to be happy and productive!
$100month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.
If youâre in the US, we offer toptier health insurance for you and your dependents, with 100% of premiums covered by Ashby. In other countries, we provide highquality supplemental health insurance for you and your dependents, also fully covered by us.
Ashbyâs success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. Weâre being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. I hope that excites you enough to apply.
Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment 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.
Our engineering culture strives to recreate the environments where we did our best work as ICs â where we had the ownership and agency to impact our users with creative and innovative software.
I started my career building software for artists in the Visual Effects industry. It was a formative experience for me as a software engineer because success relied on my ability to be a product manager and designer. I talked to artists to understand their needs. I came up with ideas. I did industry research, designed interfaces, and prototyped ideas. I watched artists use what I built and decided what to tackle in the next iteration. No daily standups, no tshirt sizing, no planning meetings.
I studied computer science to solve problems, not tickets, and this felt exactly like that. I not only felt creative and fulfilled but the agency and ownership we were given as engineers powered an incredible amount of innovation.
Innovation came differently (or not at all) at technology startups beyond the seed stage, often through an engineerâs force of will and ability to push back against culture (rather than any encouragement from it). Engineering was narrowed to implementation and delivery, partly due to the influence of other departments and partly due to the influx of Agile processes like sprint planning. In those companies, I felt like a JIRA jockey.
At Ashby, weâre building an environment that is optimistic about what engineers can own and achieve. An environment that embraces innovative engineers, and, frankly, often stays out of their way. As a Product Engineer, youâll take ownership over a large portion of one of our products and own projects endtoend (wearing hats traditionally worn by product and design). Youâll research competitors, write product specs, make wireframes, and more. To ground it with examples, product engineers at Ashby have:
Designed and built automated interview scheduling. This feature automates scheduling by calculating possible times from a pool of interviewers and other constraints, and then presenting these times to the candidate for selection via our responsive web app. This solves the âCalendar Tetrisâ problem I talk about in What Were Building.
Built a generalized declarative filter architecture that allows users to create complex filters for any record with a consistent UI and compile it to SQL in our backend. Many userfacing features use it.
Specced, designed, and implemented a feature that allows users to complete signing offers entirely within Ashby. This project involved talking to customers to understand their requirements, deciding what technologies to use, building a prototype, and working with other team members to integrate the final implementation into additional features.
Software engineers come in many flavors, not all of which fit our model. Here are some things to help you decide if this fits you and what youâre looking for:
Youâre not afraid to tackle any part of a technology stack. You do whatâs necessary to successfully deliver a feature, whether writing frontend or choosing new infrastructure. Weâll provide a supportive environment to do it successfully (e.g., design system, SRE team).
Youâve tackled projects with a lot of product and technical ambiguity, and you thrive at the intersection of the two. Weâre not building a simple CRUD app, and many of the challenges we tackle require you to use your knowledge of our customers to build powerful abstractions and flexibility in the system to solve a class of problems.
You know how to strike the right balance between speed and quality. Ashby wasnât built quickly. We took four years to launch publicly because convincing customers to switch required a highquality product. However, time isnât infinite, especially for a startup, so we still move with urgencyâweâve built the equivalent of three or more VCbacked startups with a very small team.
You are ambitious and always looking to improve your skills. For most engineers, this role will give you more freedom and responsibilities than youâve experienced in the past. To thrive (and level up), youâll need to be open to feedback (and we give lots of it).
Youâre an excellent collaborator and communicator. Ownership and freedom donât mean you work in a vacuum. Youâll need to vet your decisions with the appropriate stakeholders, keep them up to date when necessary, and work with other engineers to get your projects across the finish line. Clear and concise communication helps a lot here!
You seek to create leverage in your work. The nature of software is that you can often automate or abstract what would be tedious, timeconsuming work. Your impatience usually leads to new abstractions, tools to allow Support to debug before Engineering, new lint rules to prevent common bugs, etc.
Put another way, you shouldnât apply if:
You need companydriven process and structure to get your projects across the finish line. Sprint planning and welldefined project management processes are things you need or look to others to lead. Youâd rather focus on the technical details and challenges.
You only want to do exciting work. Weâre building a team of kind, collaborative folks. Customer issues and investigations are distributed across the team, including our highlevel ICs.
You can get lost in the details. Once you start implementation, it can be hard to take a step back and think about the project as a whole. You like everything to be planned upfront.
You havenât led or taken ownership of projects before. Youâre used to working with tech leads and taking on tasks distributed by them.
You want to mentor earliercareer engineers. We rely on engineers owning their projects, so we need engineers with that experience. This requires the team to be reasonably tenured. More than 90% of the team would be considered Senior or above in the industry today, so mentorship opportunities are very limited.
To you, a tech lead, staff, or principal engineer is someone who spends most of their time project managing or doing architecture reviews. Our most tenured engineers spend most of their time building, and we often trust them with our most challenging problems. While they lead product and technical areas and help other engineers plan their most challenging work, itâs not a requirement, nor do engineers need their signoff.
Engineering CultureOur engineering culture is motivated by Benjiâs (my Cofounder and CEO) and my belief that a small, talented team, given the right environment, can build highquality software fast (and work regular hours!). We do it through:
Minimal process with ownership over decisions normally made by product and design
Natural collaboration and deliberate communication
Investing in tools and abstractions that give us leverage
Putting effort into building a diverse team
Minimal Process & Lots of OwnershipThe best engineers weâve worked with delivered reliably magical outcomes. They took customer problems and relentlessly drove them to solutions that were not only successful but often brilliant and creative. While they did this with minimal oversight, stakeholders were never in the dark as to what was going on, and no setback was a surprise.
Traditional productdevelopment processes arenât meant for the best engineers. Their purpose is to create consistent outcomes regardless of the engineerâs skill. But, consistency comes at the expense of an engineerâs time and freedomâboth ingredients necessary to generate those magical outcomes. As a result, process stifles the best engineers and doesnât give others the opportunity to practice the behaviors that made the best engineers the âbest.â
At Ashby, we want to build an environment that encourages every engineer to be their best. So, at Ashby, every Engineer runs their project. Product Managers (and Designers) build strategy, do customer research, and hand off problem briefs to Engineers. Engineers take on the rest: they research the problem, write product specs, build wireframes, and implement their solution endtoend. We rely on engineers, not process, to push information outward to the relevant folks (e.g., Product Managers) and pull folks in to help (e.g., Designers, Infra). Itâs a new level of ownership for many engineers, but weâd rather an engineer fail a bit and coach up their skills than use process as a crutch. Not everyone succeeds in our culture, but those who do thrive.
Collaboration is Natural & Communication is DeliberateOur engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind (meet them here!). These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally. We combine this with research, prototyping, and written proposals to see around corners and get feedback from the team across time zones. Focus time is something that we hold sacred, and, with thoughtful and deliberate communication, engineers are in <2h meetings per week (I wrote about it here).
To drive it home, heres a recent calendar of an engineer who has been with us for over 4 years:
We also meet in person at least twice a year, once as a department and once as a company. You also have a small budget to meet up with folks in your cityregion.
Increase Leverage, not Team SizeWe built Ashby with the quality, breadth, and depth that many customers would expect from much larger teams over larger time scales. Weâve done this through investment in:
Great developer tooling. Our CICD takes ~10m, and we deploy at least 15x a day. A debugger that works out of the box. Everyone on the team has contributed to our developer experience đȘđŸ.
Building blocks to create powerful and customizable products fast. At the core of Ashby is a set of common components (analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) that we constantly improve. Each improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app (short video below).
Hereâs an impromptu quote from Arjun in our company Slack of what itâs like to build a feature at Ashby:
And a demo of one of these building blocks:
Put Effort into DiversityDiverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Having seen my mother and partner build their careers as minority women in nondiverse fields, I want to make sure Ashby creates opportunities for the next generation of engineers from underrepresented groups.
Today, 21% of engineers at Ashby are from underrepresented groups. Itâs not great, and we are taking conscious steps to improve, like sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, no leetcode interviews, and more.
Interview ProcessAt Ashby, our team and interview process want to help you show your best self. Weâll dive into past projects and simulate working together via pair programming, writing product and tech specs collaboratively, and talking through decisions. There are no leetcode or whiteboard exercises.
Our interview process is three rounds:
Introduction call with Hiring Manager (15 to 30m, live)
A technical screen where we pair in our actual codebase (1h, live)
Three noncoding interviews that focus on product thinking, technical design, and infrastructure (3h 15m, live can be split across multiple days)
Depending on our leadership teamâs bandwidth, we may start with an additional 30m screen with a recruiter.
Your hiring manager will be your main point of contact and prep you for interviews. Each round will have written guidance so you know what to expect (youâll need minimal preparation). Youâll meet 4 to 6 people in engineering (with 515 minutes in each interview to ask them questions). If we donât give an offer, weâll provide feedback!
Your First Three Months at AshbyWe want an exceptional onboarding experience for every new hire. At Ashby, your dev environment is set up with a single script, you push your first product change on day one, and you spend the rest of your time shipping product changes that give you a tour of our codebase and best practices. The product changes increase in scope and ambiguity from simple copy changes to the delivery of a prominent, impactful feature. Your manager will do a 30, 60, and 90day review to give feedback and calibrate on how we work together.
Itâs a team effort to get you successfully onboarded; youâll have a peer paired with you to answer questions, pair program, and check in often to see if you need help. The rest of the team will run training sessions on our culture, product, engineering process, and technical architecture.
Technology StackIâm sharing our tech stack with the caveat that we donât require previous experience in it (but a love of typed languages is helpful đ): TypeScript (frontend & backend), React, GraphQL API, Node.js, Postgres, Redis.
When they joined Ashby, many of our engineers switched from other languages like Swift and Kotlin (Ben), platforms like iOS (Tom) and Windows (Sergey). We care more about fundamentals (e.g., debugging, abstractions) and how fast you learn. For folks on the team who switched, its nice seeing changes hot reload versus waiting for XCode to compile đ
.
BenefitsCompetitive salary and equity.
10year exercise window for stock options. You shouldnât feel pressure to purchase stock options if you leave Ashby âdo it when you feel financially comfortable.
Unlimited PTO, and we will encourage you to take it.
A minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, covered by Ashby. For folks outside the US, it may be longer to be in line with regional requirements.
Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. Get what you need to be happy and productive!
$100month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.
If youâre in the US, we offer toptier health insurance for you and your dependents, with 100% of premiums covered by Ashby. In other countries, we provide highquality supplemental health insurance for you and your dependents, also fully covered by us.
Ashbyâs success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. Weâre being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. I hope that excites you enough to apply.
Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment 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.
Youâre not afraid to tackle any part of a technology stack. You do whatâs necessary to successfully deliver a feature, whether writing frontend or choosing new infrastructure. Weâll provide a supportive environment to do it successfully (e.g., design system, SRE team).
Youâve tackled projects with a lot of product and technical ambiguity, and you thrive at the intersection of the two. Weâre not building a simple CRUD app, and many of the challenges we tackle require you to use your knowledge of our customers to build powerful abstractions and flexibility in the system to solve a class of problems.
You know how to strike the right balance between speed and quality. Ashby wasnât built quickly. We took four years to launch publicly because convincing customers to switch required a highquality product. However, time isnât infinite, especially for a startup, so we still move with urgencyâweâve built the equivalent of three or more VCbacked startups with a very small team.
You are ambitious and always looking to improve your skills. For most engineers, this role will give you more freedom and responsibilities than youâve experienced in the past. To thrive (and level up), youâll need to be open to feedback (and we give lots of it).
Youâre an excellent collaborator and communicator. Ownership and freedom donât mean you work in a vacuum. Youâll need to vet your decisions with the appropriate stakeholders, keep them up to date when necessary, and work with other engineers to get your projects across the finish line. Clear and concise communication helps a lot here!
You seek to create leverage in your work. The nature of software is that you can often automate or abstract what would be tedious, timeconsuming work. Your impatience usually leads to new abstractions, tools to allow Support to debug before Engineering, new lint rules to prevent common bugs, etc.
You need companydriven process and structure to get your projects across the finish line. Sprint planning and welldefined project management processes are things you need or look to others to lead. Youâd rather focus on the technical details and challenges.
You only want to do exciting work. Weâre building a team of kind, collaborative folks. Customer issues and investigations are distributed across the team, including our highlevel ICs.
You can get lost in the details. Once you start implementation, it can be hard to take a step back and think about the project as a whole. You like everything to be planned upfront.
You havenât led or taken ownership of projects before. Youâre used to working with tech leads and taking on tasks distributed by them.
You want to mentor earliercareer engineers. We rely on engineers owning their projects, so we need engineers with that experience. This requires the team to be reasonably tenured. More than 90% of the team would be considered Senior or above in the industry today, so mentorship opportunities are very limited.
To you, a tech lead, staff, or principal engineer is someone who spends most of their time project managing or doing architecture reviews. Our most tenured engineers spend most of their time building, and we often trust them with our most challenging problems. While they lead product and technical areas and help other engineers plan their most challenging work, itâs not a requirement, nor do engineers need their signoff.
Minimal process with ownership over decisions normally made by product and design
Natural collaboration and deliberate communication
Investing in tools and abstractions that give us leverage
Putting effort into building a diverse team
Great developer tooling. Our CICD takes ~10m, and we deploy at least 15x a day. A debugger that works out of the box. Everyone on the team has contributed to our developer experience đȘđŸ.
Building blocks to create powerful and customizable products fast. At the core of Ashby is a set of common components (analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) that we constantly improve. Each improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app (short video below).
Introduction call with Hiring Manager (15 to 30m, live)
A technical screen where we pair in our actual codebase (1h, live)
Three noncoding interviews that focus on product thinking, technical design, and infrastructure (3h 15m, live can be split across multiple days)
Competitive salary and equity.
10year exercise window for stock options. You shouldnât feel pressure to purchase stock options if you leave Ashby âdo it when you feel financially comfortable.
Unlimited PTO, and we will encourage you to take it.
A minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, covered by Ashby. For folks outside the US, it may be longer to be in line with regional requirements.
Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. Get what you need to be happy and productive!
$100month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.
If youâre in the US, we offer toptier health insurance for you and your dependents, with 100% of premiums covered by Ashby. In other countries, we provide highquality supplemental health insurance for you and your dependents, also fully covered by us.
Ashbyâs success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. Weâre being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. I hope that excites you enough to apply.
Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment 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.
Depending on our leadership teamâs bandwidth, we may start with an additional 30m screen with a recruiter.
Your hiring manager will be your main point of contact and prep you for interviews. Each round will have written guidance so you know what to expect (youâll need minimal preparation). Youâll meet 4 to 6 people in engineering (with 515 minutes in each interview to ask them questions). If we donât give an offer, weâll provide feedback!
Your First Three Months at Ashby
We want an exceptional onboarding experience for every new hire. At Ashby, your dev environment is set up with a single script, you push your first product change on day one, and you spend the rest of your time shipping product changes that give you a tour of our codebase and best practices. The product changes increase in scope and ambiguity from simple copy changes to the delivery of a prominent, impactful feature. Your manager will do a 30, 60, and 90day review to give feedback and calibrate on how we work together.
Itâs a team effort to get you successfully onboarded; youâll have a peer paired with you to answer questions, pair program, and check in often to see if you need help. The rest of the team will run training sessions on our culture, product, engineering process, and technical architecture.
Technology Stack
Iâm sharing our tech stack with the caveat that we donât require previous experience in it (but a love of typed languages is helpful đ): TypeScript (frontend & backend), React, GraphQL API, Node.js, Postgres, Redis.
When they joined Ashby, many of our engineers switched from other languages like Swift and Kotlin (Ben), platforms like iOS (Tom) and Windows (Sergey). We care more about fundamentals (e.g., debugging, abstractions) and how fast you learn. For folks on the team who switched, its nice seeing changes hot reload versus waiting for XCode to compile đ .
Benefits
Hereâs an impromptu quote from Arjun in our company Slack of what itâs like to build a feature at Ashby:
And a demo of one of these building blocks:
Put Effort into Diversity
Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Having seen my mother and partner build their careers as minority women in nondiverse fields, I want to make sure Ashby creates opportunities for the next generation of engineers from underrepresented groups.
Today, 21% of engineers at Ashby are from underrepresented groups. Itâs not great, and we are taking conscious steps to improve, like sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, no leetcode interviews, and more.
Interview Process
At Ashby, our team and interview process want to help you show your best self. Weâll dive into past projects and simulate working together via pair programming, writing product and tech specs collaboratively, and talking through decisions. There are no leetcode or whiteboard exercises.
Our interview process is three rounds:
Minimal Process & Lots of Ownership
The best engineers weâve worked with delivered reliably magical outcomes. They took customer problems and relentlessly drove them to solutions that were not only successful but often brilliant and creative. While they did this with minimal oversight, stakeholders were never in the dark as to what was going on, and no setback was a surprise.
Traditional productdevelopment processes arenât meant for the best engineers. Their purpose is to create consistent outcomes regardless of the engineerâs skill. But, consistency comes at the expense of an engineerâs time and freedomâboth ingredients necessary to generate those magical outcomes. As a result, process stifles the best engineers and doesnât give others the opportunity to practice the behaviors that made the best engineers the âbest.â
At Ashby, we want to build an environment that encourages every engineer to be their best. So, at Ashby, every Engineer runs their project. Product Managers (and Designers) build strategy, do customer research, and hand off problem briefs to Engineers. Engineers take on the rest: they research the problem, write product specs, build wireframes, and implement their solution endtoend. We rely on engineers, not process, to push information outward to the relevant folks (e.g., Product Managers) and pull folks in to help (e.g., Designers, Infra). Itâs a new level of ownership for many engineers, but weâd rather an engineer fail a bit and coach up their skills than use process as a crutch. Not everyone succeeds in our culture, but those who do thrive.
Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate
Our engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind (meet them here!). These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally. We combine this with research, prototyping, and written proposals to see around corners and get feedback from the team across time zones. Focus time is something that we hold sacred, and, with thoughtful and deliberate communication, engineers are in <2h meetings per week (I wrote about it here).
To drive it home, heres a recent calendar of an engineer who has been with us for over 4 years:
We also meet in person at least twice a year, once as a department and once as a company. You also have a small budget to meet up with folks in your cityregion.
Increase Leverage, not Team Size
We built Ashby with the quality, breadth, and depth that many customers would expect from much larger teams over larger time scales. Weâve done this through investment in:
Engineering Culture
Our engineering culture is motivated by Benjiâs (my Cofounder and CEO) and my belief that a small, talented team, given the right environment, can build highquality software fast (and work regular hours!). We do it through:
Put another way, you shouldnât apply if:
Required profile
Experience
Other Skills
- Collaboration
- Communication
- Problem Solving
- Innovation
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