Engineering Manager

Engineering Manager at Ashby

Hi 👋 I’m Colin, Director of Engineering, Europe. I’m looking for an Engineering Manager to help us build a different type of engineering team and culture at Ashby, one where engineers write product specs, make product decisions, and manage projects with high autonomy.

Our Unique Engineering Philosophy

I’ve often seen engineers constrained by process, unable to get things done despite knowing what’s needed. At Ashby, we’re normalizing the ‘skunkworks’ project mentality, where engineers take total ownership from problem to completion. Our environment is optimistic about what engineers can own and achieve, embracing innovation by staying out of their way. We believe in empowering engineers, rather than boxing them into smaller, less impactful roles.

Role Responsibilities and Focus

As an Engineering Manager, you will focus deeply on individual performance, process, and culture, rather than traditional sprint planning or driving product/technical decisions. Your main goal will be building your team, cultivating their skills to thrive with ownership, and fostering an environment that enables consistent, high-quality work with minimal distractions. Junior EMs typically manage around 6 direct reports, allowing for hands-on involvement, observation, coaching, and even coding, ensuring managers remain technical without being on the critical path.

You’ll join an experienced, talented, and collaborative team of 25+ engineers, helping me manage the growing engineering presence in Europe.

Hands-On Project Examples for Engineering Leaders

• Provide feedback on product and technical specifications, coaching ICs to make sound decisions and identify scope cuts or quality improvements.
• Grow engineers to independently deliver large, loosely defined projects, providing guidance when needed while empowering their drive.
• Jump into our systems and codebase to debug customer issues, ship small bug fixes, or enhance our developer experience, maintaining strong technical skills off the critical path.
• Improve data generation and simulation in demo accounts, a project that keeps your codebase skills sharp and significantly impacts business operations across Engineering, QA, and Sales.

Why Management at Ashby?

My own experiences with both exceptional and challenging managers motivated me to pursue leadership. I love solving deeply complex problems with long-term impact on both the company and individuals’ lives. A proud achievement includes creating a fully transparent and well-received pay system, ensuring clarity in promotion mechanics. I also maintain a strong technical passion, occasionally indulging in code for tests or abstractions. I’m looking for a passionate leader who can spot patterns, devise better operating methods, and build automation to support them, much like I introduced a process allowing 30% of PRs to merge without human review, powered by self-improvable automation.

We are committed to fostering an environment free of poor management, and are willing to take a chance on courageous, principled leaders early in their journey, who challenge the status quo.

Who Should Apply (and Who Shouldn't)

Engineering leadership at Ashby requires specific attributes:

• You are deeply technical and can engage in in-depth conversations across infrastructure, backend, and frontend.
• You are excited by management challenges: driving people to excel, providing difficult feedback, and building supportive systems.
• You hold your team to high standards, providing detailed feedback even to top performers.
• You are an excellent, empathetic communicator, adept at facilitating change by understanding and navigating diverse perspectives while remaining open to feedback.
• You understand what truly exceptional engineers look like, how to recruit them, and how to develop others into them, offering nuanced insights beyond generic descriptions.
• You appreciate product, business, and design thinking, but prefer empowering your team to make decisions rather than calling all the shots yourself.
• You thrive in high-trust, high-autonomy startup environments, building strong feedback loops to accelerate your impact.

You shouldn’t apply if:

• You don’t enjoy coding or struggle to stay updated on technology.
• You entered management simply as the only available growth path.
• You prefer making all product decisions instead of empowering your team.
• You are content with a team predominantly of early- or mid-career engineers who don't thrive with ownership or autonomy, believing guardrails are essential.
• You view a staff or principal engineer primarily as someone who project manages or conducts architecture reviews.
• You are not optimistic about building a large engineering team that operates differently from the status quo, believing that common processes like sprint planning become necessary at scale.

What Ashby is Building

Talent teams need efficient hiring processes that identify great candidates, move them quickly, and provide excellent experiences. Recruiters face thousands of daily tasks coordinating information. Ashby provides intelligent, powerful software with insights and automation, simplifying complex tasks like scheduling final rounds. We design approachable products that power users can master and extend, much like spreadsheets.

We boast many customers, strong revenue growth, years of runway, and amazing investors like YCombinator, Elad Gil, and Lachy Groom.

Ashby Engineering Culture

Our culture is driven by co-founders Abhik and Benji’s belief that a small, talented team, given the right environment, can build high-quality software fast while working regular hours.

Collaboration is Natural, Communication is Deliberate

Our team consists of humble, kind lifelong learners, fostering natural collaboration. We combine this with research, prototyping, and written proposals to anticipate challenges and gather feedback across time zones. Focus time is sacred, allowing engineers 36 out of 40 hours for focused work, supported by thoughtful communication. Managers also receive consistent time for creative work.

Increase Leverage, not Team Size

We’ve achieved quality, breadth, and depth typically expected from much larger teams by investing in:

• Great developer tooling: Our CI/CD runs in ~10 minutes, with 5+ deployments daily, and everyone contributes to developer experience.
• Building blocks for powerful, customizable products: Ashby’s core components (analytics modeling, query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) are continuously improved, with each enhancement cascading throughout the application.

An impromptu quote from Arjun in our company Slack perfectly illustrates the ease of building features at Ashby.

Give Engineers Ownership & Autonomy

Engineers excel when they deeply understand a problem and own the solution. Our culture reflects this: engineers own projects end-to-end, from user interaction and product spec writing to UX design. As a manager, you'll mentor and provide feedback to ensure their success in these expanded roles.

Put Effort into Diversity

Diverse teams drive innovation. As a father of two girls, I want to contribute to a world where all industries are open and welcoming. Today, 26% of our engineers are from underrepresented groups. We are actively improving this through diverse sourcing, generous paid family leave, and no LeetCode interviews.

Interview Process

Our team and interview process are designed to help you showcase your best self through discussions of past projects and simulated collaborative work. The process involves six interviews in the following order:

• Intro Call (30m): Discuss your application, align on role responsibilities, and address your questions about Ashby.
• Past Experience Deep Dive (1h): Discuss your journey and experiences as an engineering leader.
• Technical Screen (1h): Add a feature to Ashby’s codebase, focusing on understanding the existing code and writing minimal new lines.
• Coffee Chat with VP of Engineering (1h): An informal discussion with our VP of Engineering to get acquainted.
• Meet the Team (2h): Engage with our CEO, engineers, product managers, and other team members, with the engineering leadership already excited about your candidacy.

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

Technology Stack

Our tech stack includes TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, and Redis. Previous experience is not required.

Benefits

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

Ashby’s success relies on hiring exceptional people and fostering an environment where they are happy, challenged, and productive. We are deliberately building this from the ground up, and we hope you’re excited 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.

Key skills/competency

• Engineering Leadership
• Team Management
• Technical Mentorship
• Product Ownership
• Software Development
• Culture Building
• Automation
• Developer Experience
• Strategic Thinking
• Recruitment