Hi 👋🏾, I’m Abhik, Ashby’s Co-Founder and CTO. We’re looking for a great (former) engineer who built impressive products and now builds teams of great engineers. Ashby’s success and ambition mean we’re doubling the Engineering team in the next year, and we need your experience and leadership to do it thoughtfully.

Our product and growth are exceptional. Ashby All-in-One is powerful, easy to use, and replaces several venture-backed companies' worth of products (often with a better experience). 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.

A big part of our secret sauce is how we run Engineering. We achieve incredible speed and quality by discarding many industry norms and being optimistic about Engineers. We consider what makes exceptional Engineers exceptional, figure out how to hire them, and build an environment that gives them the freedom and agency to actually be exceptional. In other words, if engineers writing product specs, making product decisions, and not breaking down projects into individual tickets excites you, you’ve found the right place.

As an Engineering Manager, you’ll work closely with me, Ben, Colin, and your peers to build out the team and continue scaling this unique culture.

You’ll first do that through grassroots leadership. You’ll manage three to five Engineers and hire three to five more. They’ll cover multiple teams and a variety of specializations, from Product Engineers to Site Reliability Engineers to Design Engineers. Your day-to-day will include:

• Providing feedback on product and technical specs to help engineers identify where to cut scope or improve quality. You don’t make the final decisions, but you’ll influence and coach ICs to reach the right ones.

• Grow engineers to the point where they can take large, loosely defined projects and deliver them with little intervention.

• Jump into our systems and code to debug a customer issue, ship a small bug fix, or improve our developer experience. Engineering leaders at Ashby are great engineers and enjoy keeping their skills up-to-date (while staying off the critical path).

You’ll also propose and lead department and company-wide initiatives. Some examples:

• Rethink how we (and the industry) do pull request reviews by aligning on goals with the team, sampling a set of PRs to understand how effective they are, and writing a proposal to the team about what we could change to speed up reviews while giving reviewers the time and space to give useful feedback.

• Design and improve interviews based on candidate and team feedback. We pride ourselves on thoughtful interviews that simulate actually working with us!

• Improve how we generate and simulate data in demo accounts. It’s a project off the critical path, but it helps you keep up-to-date on our codebase while immensely impacting the business, from Engineering to QA to Sales.

I’ll share more details once we meet.

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.

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 Shouldn’t Apply

• You don’t enjoy coding or don’t find time to stay up-to-date on technology. We believe great leaders are folks who were great engineers themselves. That starts with loving the craft and never giving it up.

• You follow the rules and accept the hand you’ve been dealt. We want folks with the ambition, courage, and follow-through to change things, whether it’s within their own team or across departments.

• You went into management because it was the only growth path available. We want folks who could have been Principal engineers (or were one!).

• You're happy with a team of engineers who are predominantly early-career or mid-career or don't thrive with ownership or autonomy. You believe that with enough guardrails, the team can get things done.

• To you, a Staff or Principal Engineer is someone who spends most of their time project managing or conducting architecture reviews. You don’t believe staff and principal engineers could lead by the example they set or the leverage they create through their work.

• You’re not optimistic or convinced that we can build a large engineering team that functions differently from 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 in-depth 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 or consistency.

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 with ownership over decisions normally made by product and design

• Natural collaboration and deliberate communication

• Putting effort into building a diverse team

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:

• Great developer tooling. Our CI/CD 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 💪🏾.

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 Process

This is an important role and our interview process reflects that both in challenge and length (5h 15m):

1. Introduction call with Ben (30m, live)

2. A technical screen where you and Ben pair in our actual codebase (1h, live)

3. An interview with Ben to explore your past experience as a leader (1h, live)

4. Interview with Abhik, VP of Engineering (45m, live)

5. Interview with Colin, Head of Engineering EMEA (30m, live)

6. Final round where you meet Engineers and other Engineering Managers (90m, live)

Depending on my bandwidth, we may start with an additional 30m screen with a recruiter. Near the end of the process, we’ll do reference checks.

This is also an important decision for you, so I’m always happy to have coffee chats in person or over Zoom to get to know each other. If we don’t move forward, we’re happy to share feedback.

Your First Six Months at Ashby

Your first three months at Ashby will be spent learning about Ashby Engineering and easing into leadership by being an IC. What better way to learn how ICs work than to be one! Don’t worry if you don’t know our technologies. The team is really helpful, and our dev environment is pretty awesome: it sets up in a single script, and you’ll be able to push your first product change on day one.

You and I will do 30-day, 60-day, 90-day, and 6-month reviews to calibrate on our unique culture and how you, I, and the team will work together.

This role will initially report to me, but may report to Ben, our Director of Engineering, over time.

Technology Stack

I’m sharing our tech stack with the caveat that we don’t require previous experience in it (but a love of typed languages is helpful 😀): 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 😅.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.

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.