Staff Platform Engineer

About the Role: Staff Platform Engineer at Ashby

Ashby is seeking a curious, rigorous, and problem-hungry Staff Platform Engineer who is passionate about coding and dedicated to scaling our platform to new heights. Ashby provides innovative software for talent teams, enabling efficient, delightful, and respectful hiring processes. As a Platform Engineer, you will contribute to building a 'paved road' that empowers engineering teams to ship high-quality software rapidly and reliably.

Ashby boasts notable customers such as Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake, with impressive growth metrics: tens of millions in ARR, over 100% year-over-year growth, 2500+ customers, very low churn, and substantial runway.

This role is listed as both Platform Engineer and Site Reliability Engineer, reflecting our team's dual responsibilities and openness to candidates leaning towards either discipline.

About The Role And How We Work

Colin, Head of EMEA Engineering, emphasizes the critical value of talented infrastructure engineers in building robust, humming systems. While Ashby's infrastructure is currently strong, rapid growth continuously strains existing systems and demands new capabilities to support innovative product features.

We highly value infrastructure-as-code. As a Staff Platform Engineer, you will dive into scaling challenges, enhance platform capabilities, and shape how the entire team interacts with infrastructure. Engineers at Ashby own projects end-to-end, shipping with minimal oversight. We prioritize common sense over restrictive processes, recognizing the great responsibility that comes with handling personal and confidential data. As we scale, reliability and security become paramount, requiring our internal operations to evolve.

Ashby is at an inflection point where platform scalability and seamless experience are crucial. You will be instrumental in making sound decisions, debugging complex issues, and building a future-proof platform for our fast-growing customers. The small but mighty infrastructure team has established a secure and simple environment, and you will extend this by owning projects end-to-end, impacting both developer and user experience. Example projects include:

• Optimizing our homegrown ultra-dynamic recruiting DSL-to-SQL compiler and creating developer tools for it.
• Establishing automated guardrails for customer data security and privacy.
• Enabling fast feature shipping through canary deploys, gradual rollouts, and feature flags while managing complexity and reducing downtime.
• Defining SLOs and implementing corresponding SLIs with business and engineering teams.
• Ensuring all communication with external services supports retries and circuit-breakers.
• Implementing infrastructure for an event-driven architecture and data warehouse.

We seek someone who builds systems engineers love to work with: mature, reliable, yet open-minded and approachable. Balancing reliability with flexibility is key. In this mission-critical SRE role, you must be extremely comfortable evaluating and managing risk.

Why You Should or Shouldn't Apply

You Should Apply If:

• You are relentlessly curious and obsessed with solving complex problems, diligently hunting for solutions.
• You advocate for future users, edge cases, and robust designs, collaborating with product engineers as allies.
• You deeply care about your work and team, actively contributing to hiring and fostering mutual improvement.
• You have experience scaling infrastructure at a later stage, managing millions of data points, and automating provisioning, monitoring, and release processes.
• You are a versatile 'Swiss army knife,' eager to tackle diverse challenges from infrastructure updates and security enforcement to database optimization, Kubernetes debugging, and Typescript trace analysis.

You Should Not Apply If:

• You prefer a lead or manager to make final decisions on platform strategy rather than owning and being accountable for your own choices.
• You dislike SQL, as the role involves data-intensive features and advising on data models.
• You are unwilling to code; our SREs are software engineers responsible for application-level platform work, including code reviews and submissions.
• Your primary mode of communication is live meetings; Ashby has a strong async culture, relying on written communication and code for changes.
• You struggle with self-directed project management, seeking help, and managing scope without constant prodding.

Technology Stack

Our tech stack includes: TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, and Redis. We use Datadog and Sentry on 100% cloud-based (AWS) infrastructure. Developer experience and reliability are paramount; all engineers participate in a follow-the-sun on-call rotation and contribute to developer tooling. We don't require prior experience with this exact stack.

What We're Building

Ashby was founded to address the shortcomings of existing Talent Acquisition software, which often hindered recruiting teams. We build intelligent, powerful software that provides insights and automates or simplifies complex tasks, aiming to make TA teams the envy of other departments.

Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture, inspired by co-founders Abhik and Benji, emphasizes a small, talented team building high-quality software fast, while working regular hours. This is achieved through:

• Minimal Process & Lots of Ownership: Engineers take on significant ownership, from researching problems to writing specs, designing, and implementing solutions end-to-end. We trust engineers to proactively communicate and seek help, fostering growth even through occasional failure.
• Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate: Our team of talented, humble, and kind lifelong learners collaborates naturally. We use research, prototyping, and written proposals, allowing for extensive focus time with less than 2 hours of meetings per week. We also meet in person twice a year, with a budget for regional meetups.
• Increase Leverage, not Team Size: We build with quality, breadth, and depth comparable to much larger teams by investing in great developer tooling (e.g., CI/CD ~10m, 15+ deploys/day), an out-of-the-box debugger, and powerful, customizable building blocks (analytics, policy/workflow engines, design system).
• Put Effort into Diversity: We believe diverse teams drive innovation. While our current 21% underrepresented engineers is not ideal, we are actively improving through diverse sourcing, generous paid family leave, and no Leetcode interviews.

Interview Process

Ashby's interview process is designed to help you showcase your best self. It involves diving into past projects and simulating collaborative work through pair programming, joint spec writing, and decision discussions. There are no Leetcode or whiteboard exercises.

Our interview process consists of three main rounds:

• Introduction call with Hiring Manager (15-30m, live)
• A technical screen involving pair programming in our actual codebase (1h, live)
• Three non-coding interviews focusing on technical design, debugging incidents, and infrastructure (3h 15m, live, can be split)

Depending on leadership bandwidth, an additional 30m recruiter screen may precede these. Your hiring manager will be your main contact, providing guidance for each round. You'll meet 4-6 engineers and receive feedback regardless of the outcome.

Your First Three Months at Ashby

We ensure an exceptional onboarding experience. Your dev environment is set up with a single script, allowing you to push your first product change on day one. Subsequent work involves shipping product changes of increasing scope and ambiguity, providing a tour of our codebase and best practices. Your manager will conduct 30, 60, and 90-day reviews. A peer will be paired with you for support, pair programming, and regular check-ins. The team also runs training sessions on culture, product, engineering process, and technical architecture.

Benefits

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

Ashby is committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce, providing equal employment opportunities without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.

Key skills/competency

• Platform Engineering
• Site Reliability Engineering
• Infrastructure as Code
• AWS Cloud
• Kubernetes
• TypeScript/Node.js
• Postgres/Redis
• System Architecture
• Security & Privacy
• CI/CD & Automation