Hi đ Iâm Colin, Director of Engineering, Europe. How do you feel about engineers writing product specs, making product decisions, and not breaking down projects into individual tickets? If that sounds exciting (even if a bit scary), read on because Iâm looking for an engineering manager to help us build a different type of engineering team and culture at Ashby.
Weâve already gathered an experienced, talented, and collaborative team of 25+ engineers. Youâll help me manage the growing team of engineers in Europe.
I had two experiences early in my career that set me on my path. I had a great manager who asked tonnes of questions about the decisions I was making and coached me without me realizing it. And I had a terrible manager being told to work harder after a week of 3am finishes was not what I needed as a young engineer. The stark difference between these two experiences motivated me to become a manager: I wanted every engineer I worked with to have the support I had in the best case.
Since then, as Iâve learned more, Iâve realized that I love the kind of problems I get to solve as a manager. Deeply complex problems with longterm impact both on the company and on peopleâs lives. One of my proudest achievements is creating a fully transparent pay system, and on the day it was revealed, everybody was happy with it. Nobody stormed out. By spending time thinking deeply about everybodyâs pay and ensuring the mechanics of promotion were clear, I put the team in a place where they could see a peer was paid more than them, and it not be a problem.
Despite all this, I love being technical. I sometimes indulge myself and spend a morning writing some code to improve tests or provide better abstractions. If I couldnât be a manager, Iâd be super happy to be an IC.
Iâm looking for someone who is passionate. Passionate about both management and being technical. Someone who spots a pattern amongst their team, figures out a better way for us to operate, and then builds the automation that powers it. I introduced a new process that enables engineers to merge 30% of PRs without a human review beforehand. I also built the automation that approves these PRs. I also built that automation with abstractions that make it easy for the engineers to improve the automation themselves.
It can be hard to find seasoned engineering leaders who havenât succumbed to the status quo in some way or another. Were committed to giving all our people a total and utter lack of terrible managers, and that means were willing to take a chance on someone early in their leadership journey whos courageous, principled, and has the drive to build themselves into a great leader who can say âYah I know everyone is doing that, but we wont because...â
Engineering leadership comes in many flavors, not all of which fit our model. I thought Iâd outline some things Iâm looking for to help you decide if this fits what youâre looking for:
You love being technical and can hold indepth conversations with direct reports from infra to backend to frontend.
You enjoy management problems. We want people who get excited about driving people to be their best, giving difficult feedback, and building systems that make this easier
You hold your team to a high standard and donât shy away from getting into the details and giving feedback, even to the best folks on your team.
You are an excellent and empathetic communicator. Facilitating change at both an individual and organization level requires understanding how to navigate the beliefs, opinions, and past experiences of engineers and figuring out how to both convince them of a new way of doing things while also leaving yourself open to feedback.
You know what exceptional engineers look like. Youâve thought deeply about what makes them tick, how to recruit them, and how to grow folks into them. I want to see depth here, the industry often regurgitates a vanilla description, but the reality is more nuanced.
Youâre good at thinking about product, business, and maybe even design, but youâre not interested in calling the shots and are more interested in building a team that can make the best decisions without you.
You thrive in hightrust, highautonomy environments. Were a young startup where leaders wear multiple hats, and youll build your own (highspeed) onramp through developing strong feedback loops.
Put another way, you shouldnât apply if:
You donât enjoy coding or donât find time to stay uptodate on technology.
Youâve gotten into management because it was the only growth path available
You want to make all the product decisions instead of empowering your team to make those calls.
Youre happy with a team of engineers that are predominantly earlycareer, midcareer, or dont thrive with ownership or autonomy. With enough guardrails, the team can get things done.
A staff or principal engineer to you is someone who spends most of their time project managing or doing architecture reviews.
Youâre not optimistic or convinced that we can build a large engineering team that functions differently than the status quo. You think, at some size, common processes need to be implemented to ensure consistent product delivery (e.g., sprint planning, product managers writing indepth specifications). You might not say it out loud, but you think, at some size, compromises have to be made for the sake of hiring numbers.
Talent teams aspire to build a hiring process that identifies great candidates, moves them quickly through the interview process, and provides an excellent experience for the candidate. To accomplish this, recruiters perform thousands of daily tasks to coordinate and relay information between candidates, interviewers, and hiring managers. Teams struggle to keep up!
Scheduling a final round is an excellent example of our customers challenges. A recruiter needs to collect availability from the candidate, identify potential interviewers, perform âCalendar Tetrisâ to find who is available to interview the candidate, schedule on the earliest date possible, and perform any lastminute adjustments as availability changes. They must perform this while considering the interview load on each individual and whether interviewers need to be trained and shadowing others. đĽľ
Ashby provides talent teams with intelligent and powerful software that provides insights into where theyâre failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks theyâre underwater with. We put a lot of effort into designing products that are approachable to beginners but mastered and extended by power users. In many ways, spreadsheets set the bar here.
We have many customers, great revenue growth, years of runway, and amazing investors like YCombinator, Elad Gil, and Lachy Groom. Iâll share more once we meet.
Our engineering culture is motivated by Abhik and Benjiâs (our cofounders) belief that a small talented team, given the right environment, can build highquality software fast (and work regular hours!).
Our engineering team (and the team at large) consists of lifelong learners who are humble and kind (meet them here!). These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally (we filter for it in interviews). 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 can focus 36h out of a 40h work week (Abhik wrote about it here). Even managers can rely on getting consistent time (and support to make, if necessary) to focus and do creative work without the demand of constant meetings.
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:
Great developer tooling. Our CICD takes ~10m, and we deploy at least 5x a day. Everyone on the team has contributed to developer experience đŞđž
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) which we are constantly improving. Each improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app (short video on it here).
And a demo of one of these building blocks:
We, as engineers, find clever ways to solve problems, which amplifies when we deeply understand the problem. All of us in technical leadership did our best work as engineers when we had a deep understanding of the enduser and the business and ownership over the solution. Our engineering culture reflects this experience: engineers own projects endtoend, from speaking with users to writing product specs to UX design. These are skills that we often donât get to practice as engineers, and, as a manager at Ashby, youâll provide mentorship and feedback to engineers to ensure they are successful when delivering projects.
Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. As the father of two young girls, I want to see them grow up in a world where all industries are open and welcoming to everyone, regardless of race, gender, or preferences. Helping to build a more diverse team at Ashby is my way of contributing to this change.
At Ashby, our team and interview process want to help you show your best self. Weâll dive into past projects and simulate working together. Our interview process is six interviews in the following order:
Intro Call (30m) Discuss your application questions, align on the responsibilities of the role, and answer questions about Ashby.
Past Experience Deep Dive (1h) Discuss your past experience as an engineering leader.
Technical Screen (1h) Add a feature back to Ashby. Youll spend most of your time understanding a specific part of our codebase and write less than 15 lines of code.
Coffee Chat with VP of Engineering (1h) Spend time with our VP of Engineering and get to know each other.
Meet the Team (2h) At this point, the engineering leadership team is excited about you and youll meet our CEO, Engineers, Product Managers, and some other folks on the team.
I will be your main point of contact and prepare you for interviews. If we donât give an offer, weâll provide feedback!
Iâm sharing our tech stack with the caveat that we donât require previous experience: TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, Redis.
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 with four weeks recommended per year. Expect âVacation?â in our oneonone agenda until you start taking it đ .
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.
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.
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