Hi üëãüèæ I‚Äôm Abhik, Ashby's Co-Founder and VP of Engineering. We‚Äôre looking for a versatile, persistent product engineer who‚Äôs not afraid to set up reusable building blocks across the stack and advocate for the time and space to do so. At Ashby, all our engineers ship features end-to-end at a high pace. Example is the best leadership. We‚Äôll give you the room to do your best work, and you'll be our guide! If that speaks to you, read on.
What Ashby gives you in return is the best of both early and growth-stage environments. The agency and no-nonsense of a seed startup: you write product specs, make product and design decisions, and build in an almost-no-meeting culture. While also the product-market fit and scale of a growth-stage startup: 100,000+ weekly active users who depend on your software and eagerly await your next feature.
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, very low churn, and many years of runway. We’ll share more details once we meet.
You’ve probably seen this role posted before, and it’s because we’re always expanding the team (we’re on track to double Engineering this year). We’re bubbling with ideas for how to support Talent Acquisition with software, and we recently launched Talent Management products to expand our total addressable market and become a company worth $60B+.
We read every application and aim to respond to yours within 3-4 days (often sooner).
About The Role And How We WorkOur engineering culture strives to recreate the environments where we did our best work as ICs – 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 stand-ups, no t-shirt 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 engineer’s 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.
AboutAt Ashby, we’re 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, you’ll take ownership over a large portion of one of our products and own projects end-to-end (wearing hats traditionally worn by product and design). You’ll research competitors, write product specs, make wireframes, and more. To ground it with examples, product engineers at Ashby have:
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 Talent Acquisition (TA) software. Recruiting teams were leveling up how they did their work, but instead of software meeting this new standard, it held them back.
Scheduling a final round is an excellent example. Recruiting teams wanted to schedule candidates faster, track interviewer preparation and quality, and do it with half the headcount. A recruiter needed to manually collect availability from the candidate, identify qualified interviewers, perform ‚ÄúCalendar Tetris‚Äù to find who is available to interview the candidate, schedule on the earliest date possible, and make any last-minute adjustments as availability changed. They must do this while considering the interview load on each individual and whether interviewers need to be trained and shadowing others. ü•µ TA software didn‚Äôt help.
As hiring managers, we know TA is a critical function, and as engineers, we know software can do better. So, we built and continue to build Ashby to give TA teams the highest standard of tooling. Software that’s intelligent and powerful. Software that provides insights into where they’re failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they’re underwater with. We want other functions and departments to be jealous of what TA teams can do with Ashby, and today they often are!
As we’ve set the standard for excellence in TA software, HR teams have pulled us into solving their problems in areas like onboarding and performance management.
Why You Should or Shouldn’t Apply
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 You’re Looking For
Put Another Way, You Shouldn’t Apply If
Engineering Culture
Our Engineering Culture Is Motivated By Benji’s (my Co-founder And CEO) And My Belief That a Small, Talented Team, Given The Right Environment, Can Build High-quality Software Fast (and Work Regular Hours!). We Do It Through
Minimal Process & Lots of OwnershipThe best engineers we’ve 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 product-development processes aren’t meant for the best engineers. Their purpose is to create consistent outcomes regardless of the engineer’s skill. But, consistency comes at the expense of an engineer’s time and freedom—both ingredients necessary to generate those magical outcomes. As a result, process stifles the best engineers and doesn’t give others the opportunity to practice the behaviors that made the best engineers the “best.”
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 end-to-end. 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). It’s a new level of ownership for many engineers, but we’d 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, Here's a Recent Calendar Of An Engineer Who Has Been With Us For Over 4 Years. ~34 Hours Of Focus Time, 2.5h Of Interviews, And 3.5 Hours Of Meetings
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 city/region.
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. We’ve Done This Through Investment In
And a Demo Of One Of These Building BlocksHere’s an impromptu quote from Arjun in our company Slack of what it’s like to build a feature at Ashby:
Put Effort into DiversityDiverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Having seen my mother and partner build their careers as minority women in non-diverse fields, I want to make sure Ashby creates opportunities for the next generation of engineers from underrepresented groups.
Today, 25% of engineers and 50% of our engineering leaders at Ashby are from underrepresented groups. We are taking conscious steps to improve, like sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, no leetcode interviews, and more.
Work-Life Balance: It’s A Marathon, Not a SprintThe intensity of work at Ashby should feel like a marathon, not a sprint (nor speed-walking). We work with urgency and ambition to build excellent software, but we don’t need to prove out a new software category or product-market fit. That requires ingenuity and thoughtfulness, and that doesn’t happen with unrealistic deadlines or sleepless nights.
Our remote, low-meeting, high-ownership culture gives you a lot of flexibility in how you structure your days and weeks. In practice, that means you keep your own hours, but there will be moments of intensity, like launching your feature at our annual user conference. We offer unlimited PTO, and you actually get to use it. Some of our most exceptional engineers take almost 30 days of vacation per year.
This way of working allows many of us on the team to be active parents, including Benji and me. I block off 1.5 hours every morning to spend with my daughter and drop her off at school. Mujda (Product Engineer) puts it best in an article about us: “I can say that Ashby is a great place to be a mom… No one bats an eye if I have to take my kid to a doctor’s appointment or have to work weird hours because childcare fell through.”
Interview ProcessAt Ashby, our team and interview process want to help you show your best self. We’ll 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
Depending on our leadership team’s 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 (you’ll need minimal preparation). You’ll meet 4 to 6 people in engineering (with 5-15 minutes in each interview to ask them questions). If we don’t give an offer, we’ll 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 90-day review to give feedback and calibrate on how we work together.
It’s a team effort to get you successfully onboarded; you’ll 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 StackI‚Äôm sharing our tech stack with the caveat that we don‚Äôt require previous experience in it (but a love of typed languages is helpful üòÄ): 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 (Adam). We care more about fundamentals (e.g., debugging, abstractions) and how fast you learn. For folks on the team who switched, it's nice seeing changes hot reload versus waiting for XCode to compile üòÖ.
Benefits
Ashby’s success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. We’re 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.Ashby is committed to a fair and transparent hiring process. We confirm that this advertisement is for an active, existing vacancy within our organization. Please be advised that we may use artificial intelligence-driven tools to assist our recruitment team in screening, assessing, and selecting candidates for this position.Compensation Range: €154K - €250K
