Engineering Manager, Europe

Hello from Colin, Director of Engineering, Europe

I’m Colin, Director of Engineering, Europe. I’m looking for an Engineering Manager, Europe to help us build a different type of engineering team and culture at Ashby. If the idea of engineers writing product specs, making product decisions, and not breaking down projects into individual tickets sounds exciting (even if a bit scary), then read on!

Why We Need to Be Different

Time and again, I've seen engineers hindered by “process” or “lack of data,” despite knowing what needs to be done. The most effective projects often resemble “skunkworks,” where engineers take total ownership from problem to completion. We want to normalize this at Ashby. Traditional processes stem from a pessimistic mindset, boxing people into smaller roles. At Ashby, we foster an optimistic environment, embracing innovative engineers and empowering them to achieve great things.

Your Role as an Engineering Manager, Europe

As an Engineering Manager, Europe, you will focus deeply on individual performance, process, and culture, rather than running sprint planning or dictating product/technical decisions. Your main goal will be to build and grow your team's skills, ensuring they thrive with the ownership given, and creating an environment where they consistently do their best work with minimal distraction. Junior EMs typically manage around 6 direct reports, allowing time for observation, correction, praise, and even coding. We encourage our managers to be hands-on without becoming a critical path bottleneck.

You will join an experienced, talented, and collaborative team of 25+ engineers, helping to manage and grow our European engineering cohort.

Projects Our Engineering Leaders Undertake

• Provide feedback on product and technical specifications, coaching ICs to make the right decisions and scope adjustments.
• Develop engineers to independently deliver large, loosely defined projects, while still fostering a culture where asking for help is encouraged.
• Dive into systems and code to debug customer issues, ship bug fixes, or enhance developer experience, maintaining strong technical skills.
• Improve data generation and simulation for demo accounts, a project that keeps skills sharp and impacts various business functions.

Why Embrace a Management Role?

My own career journey, marked by both a great coaching manager and a terrible one, ignited my passion for management. I want every engineer to experience the support and growth I had in the best-case scenario. As a manager, I'm drawn to solving deeply complex problems with long-term impact on both the company and individuals’ lives. Creating a fully transparent, well-received pay system stands as a proud achievement, demonstrating how clear mechanics can foster trust and fairness. Despite my management passion, I remain technical, often indulging in coding for test improvements or abstractions, and would be equally content as an Individual Contributor (IC).

I seek someone passionate about both management and technical work, someone who identifies patterns, devises better operational methods, and builds automation to empower the team. For example, I implemented a process allowing 30% of PRs to merge without human review and built the automation for it, with abstractions that engineers can improve. We're committed to eliminating terrible management experiences and are willing to invest in courageous, principled, and driven leaders, even early in their journey, who challenge the status quo.

Is This Role for You?

Engineering leadership manifests in diverse forms, and our model isn't for everyone. Consider applying if:

• You are deeply technical and can engage in in-depth conversations across infra, backend, and frontend domains.
• You are excited by management challenges, passionate about driving people to excel, providing difficult feedback, and building supportive systems.
• You uphold high standards for your team, willingly diving into details and offering constructive feedback to all.
• You possess excellent, empathetic communication skills, crucial for navigating beliefs and experiences to facilitate individual and organizational change.
• You have a profound understanding of what makes exceptional engineers, how to recruit them, and how to foster their growth beyond generic descriptions.
• You are adept at product, business, and even design thinking, but prefer empowering your team to make decisions rather than calling all the shots.
• You thrive in high-trust, high-autonomy startup environments, building strong feedback loops to accelerate your impact.

Conversely, you shouldn't apply if:

• You dislike coding or struggle to stay technically current.
• You pursued management purely as the only available growth path.
• You prefer making all product decisions yourself instead of empowering your team.
• You're content with a team predominantly of early/mid-career engineers who require extensive guardrails and don't thrive with ownership/autonomy.
• You view staff/principal engineers primarily as project managers or architecture reviewers.
• You're pessimistic about building a large, non-status-quo engineering team, believing common processes like sprint planning become inevitable with scale.

What Ashby is Building

Talent teams strive for efficient hiring processes that quickly identify and move great candidates while providing an excellent experience. This involves thousands of daily tasks like scheduling, coordination, and information relay. Ashby provides intelligent software that offers insights into hiring challenges and automates or simplifies many overburdening tasks. We prioritize designing products that are approachable for beginners yet extensible for power users, much like a spreadsheet.

We boast numerous customers, strong revenue growth, years of runway, and support from amazing investors including YCombinator, Elad Gil, and Lachy Groom.

Ashby's Engineering Culture

Our culture is rooted in our co-founders' belief that a small, talented team, given the right environment, can build high-quality software rapidly while maintaining regular hours.

Collaboration is Natural, Communication is Deliberate

Our team comprises lifelong learners who are humble and kind, fostering natural collaboration. We combine this with research, prototyping, and written proposals to anticipate challenges and gather feedback across time zones. We protect focus time rigorously, allowing engineers to achieve 36 hours of focused work in a 40-hour week. Even managers receive consistent time and support for creative work, free from constant meetings.

Increase Leverage, Not Team Size

Ashby has achieved the quality, breadth, and depth typically expected from much larger teams over longer periods through strategic investments:

• Great developer tooling: Our CI/CD completes in ~10 minutes, with deployments occurring at least 5 times daily. Everyone contributes to enhancing the developer experience.
• Powerful building blocks: At our core are common components (analytics modeling, query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) that we continuously improve. Enhancements here cascade throughout our application.

Give Engineers Ownership & Autonomy

Engineers find clever solutions, especially when they deeply understand the problem. Our technical leadership observed that their best engineering work came from deep understanding of the end-user and business, coupled with ownership. Our culture reflects this: engineers own projects end-to-end, from user interaction and product spec writing to UX design. As an Engineering Manager, Europe, you will mentor and provide feedback to help engineers succeed in these expanded roles.

Commitment to Diversity

Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. As a company, we are actively taking steps to improve diversity, including sourcing diverse candidates, offering generous paid family leave, and avoiding LeetCode interviews. Currently, 26% of our engineers are from underrepresented groups, and we are dedicated to improving this figure.

Ashby's Interview Process

Our interview process is designed to help you showcase your best self, combining discussions about past projects with simulated work. The process consists of six interviews:

• Intro Call (30m): Discuss application questions, align on role responsibilities, and answer your questions about Ashby.
• Past Experience Deep Dive (1h): Comprehensive discussion of your experience as an engineering leader.
• Technical Screen (1h): Add a feature to Ashby's codebase, focusing on understanding a specific part of the codebase and writing minimal code.
• Coffee Chat with VP of Engineering (1h): An informal chat to get acquainted with our VP of Engineering.
• Meet the Team (2h): You'll meet our CEO, Engineers, Product Managers, and other team members, showing the leadership team's excitement about you.

I will be your main point of contact, preparing you for interviews and providing feedback regardless of the outcome.

Technology Stack

Our primary tech stack includes TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, and Redis. While this is our stack, previous experience with these specific technologies is not required.

Benefits at Ashby

• Competitive salary and equity package.
• 10-year exercise window for stock options, reducing pressure to purchase upon leaving.
• Unlimited PTO with a recommendation of four weeks per year, actively encouraged by management.
• Generous budget for equipment, software, and office furniture to ensure comfort and productivity.
• $100/month education budget, with larger items like conferences covered upon manager approval.

Ashby thrives on hiring exceptional people and cultivating an environment where happiness, challenge, and peak performance are the norm. We are deliberately building this environment from the ground up, and we hope this vision excites you.

Key skills/competency

• Engineering Leadership
• Team Building
• Technical Mentorship
• Coaching
• TypeScript
• Node.js
• React
• GraphQL
• Postgres
• Redis