Senior Product Software Engineer

About Ashby

Ashby, co-founded by Abhik (VP of Engineering), is seeking an ambitious full-stack engineer laser-focused on solving customer problems and making long-term investments. This role offers the best of both early and growth-stage environments: the agency and no-nonsense culture of a seed startup (writing product specs, making product and design decisions, almost no meetings) combined with the product-market fit and scale of a growth-stage company (tens of thousands of daily users, notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, Snowflake).

Ashby boasts best-in-class growth and retention, with tens of millions in ARR, over 100% year-over-year growth, very low churn, and substantial runway. The team is expanding rapidly, on track to double this year, with a vision to revolutionize Talent Acquisition software and beyond.

About The Role And How We Work

Ashby's engineering culture empowers individual contributors with ownership and agency to create innovative software. The philosophy is to let engineers solve problems, not just tickets, by blending product management and design responsibilities into the engineering role. This avoids the pitfalls of excessive Agile processes and allows engineers to focus on impactful innovation.

As a Senior Product Software Engineer, you will take end-to-end ownership of significant portions of Ashby's products, encompassing competitor research, product specification writing, wireframing, and implementation. Examples of past projects include designing and building automated interview scheduling, developing a generalized declarative filter architecture, and implementing a feature for completing offer signings entirely within Ashby.

What We’re Building

Ashby is building intelligent and powerful tooling for Talent Acquisition (TA) teams, aiming to set a new standard where software elevates, rather than hinders, TA professionals. The goal is to provide insights, automate tedious tasks, and simplify complex processes like interview scheduling, making TA functions more efficient and strategic.

Why You Should or Shouldn’t Apply

This role is ideal for engineers who:

• Are comfortable tackling any part of a technology stack to deliver features successfully.
• Thrive amidst product and technical ambiguity, building powerful abstractions.
• Know how to balance speed and quality effectively.
• Are ambitious, continuously seeking to improve skills, and open to feedback.
• Are excellent collaborators and communicators, vetting decisions with stakeholders.
• Seek to create leverage in their work through automation and abstraction.

Conversely, this role may not be a fit if you:

• Require extensive company-driven process and structure.
• Prefer to focus solely on technical details rather than owning the product aspects.
• Get lost in implementation details without a holistic view or upfront planning.
• Haven't led or taken significant ownership of projects.
• Are looking for extensive mentorship opportunities for earlier-career engineers.
• Believe a tech lead or staff engineer primarily project manages or performs architecture reviews.

Engineering Culture

Ashby's engineering culture is built on the belief that a small, talented team, given the right environment, can build high-quality software quickly while maintaining regular hours. This is achieved through:

• Minimal process with engineers owning product and design decisions.
• Natural collaboration and deliberate communication.
• Investment in tools and abstractions for leverage.
• A concerted effort to build a diverse team.

Engineers are encouraged to drive projects relentlessly, pushing information outwards and pulling in help as needed. Communication is deliberate to maintain focus time, resulting in engineers typically having less than two hours of meetings per week. The team also meets in person twice a year and provides a budget for local meetups.

The company emphasizes increasing leverage through great developer tooling (e.g., ~10m CI/CD, 15+ deployments daily), a debugger that works out of the box, and a robust set of common building blocks (analytics modeling, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) that cascade improvements across the application.

Ashby is committed to diversity, actively sourcing diverse candidates, offering generous paid family leave, and avoiding LeetCode interviews. Currently, 21% of engineers are from underrepresented groups, and continuous steps are being taken to improve this.

Interview Process

Ashby's interview process is designed to help candidates showcase their best selves, focusing on past projects and simulating collaborative work. There are no LeetCode or whiteboard exercises. The process includes:

1. Introduction call with a Hiring Manager (15-30m, live).
2. A technical screen involving pair programming in the actual codebase (1h, live).
3. Three non-coding interviews covering product thinking, technical design, and infrastructure (3h 15m, live, can be split).

Depending on leadership bandwidth, an additional 30-minute recruiter screen might precede these rounds. The hiring manager is the main point of contact, providing written guidance for each round. Candidates will meet 4-6 engineers and receive feedback regardless of the outcome.

Your First Three Months at Ashby

New hires experience an exceptional onboarding: dev environment setup with a single script, first product change pushed on day one, and continuous shipping of product changes that tour the codebase. Scope and ambiguity increase, culminating in prominent feature delivery. Managers conduct 30, 60, and 90-day reviews. A peer is paired with each new hire for support, and the team provides training sessions on culture, product, engineering process, and technical architecture.

Technology Stack

Ashby's tech stack includes: TypeScript (frontend & backend), React, GraphQL API, Node.js, Postgres, Redis. Prior experience in this specific stack is not required; Ashby values fundamentals (debugging, abstractions) and learning agility. Many engineers have successfully transitioned from other languages and platforms.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity with a 10-year exercise window for stock options.
• Unlimited PTO with encouragement to use it.
• Minimum 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave (potentially longer to align with regional requirements outside the US).
• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget.
• $100/month education budget, with conferences covered by manager approval.
• Top-tier health insurance for US employees and dependents (100% premiums covered); high-quality supplemental health insurance for non-US employees and dependents (fully covered).

Ashby is committed to fostering an environment where employees are happy, challenged, and do their best work, welcoming people from all backgrounds.

Key skills/competency

• Full-stack Development
• TypeScript
• React
• Node.js
• Postgres
• GraphQL
• Product Management
• UI/UX Design
• System Design
• Problem Solving