Staff Platform Engineer

About Ashby

Ashby is seeking a curious, rigorous, problem-hungry Staff Platform Engineer to help bring Ashby to the big leagues. Ashby builds software that empowers talent teams to create efficient, delightful, and respectful hiring processes. You will build a "paved road" for excellent engineering teams to scale safely and effectively.

We boast notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. Our metrics are strong: tens of millions in ARR, over 100% YoY growth, 2500+ customers, low churn, and robust runway.

About The Role and How We Work

Colin, Head of EMEA Engineering, emphasizes the critical role of infrastructure teams in startups. While Ashby's current infrastructure is solid, rapid growth necessitates ongoing scaling and new capabilities to support innovative product features. The team values infrastructure-as-code, focusing on safety and efficiency over restrictive processes, especially given the handling of confidential data.

This role is at an inflection point, where platform stability directly impacts customer experience for fast-growing companies. You will contribute to a small but impactful infrastructure team, owning projects end-to-end and directly influencing the Ashby developer and user experience. Example projects include optimizing a recruiting DSL-to-SQL compiler, creating data security guardrails, enabling fast feature shipping via canary deploys, defining SLOs/SLIs, ensuring external service resilience, and implementing event-driven architectures.

Ashby seeks an engineer who values building mature, reliable, yet flexible systems. The role requires extreme comfort in evaluating and managing risk, balancing availability with adaptability in mission-critical software environments.

Why You Should Apply

• You are relentlessly curious, diving deep into complex problems until a solution emerges, supported by state-of-the-art monitoring and data.
• You advocate for future users, edge cases, and robust designs, collaborating with product engineers as allies.
• You care deeply about your work and team, actively contributing to hiring and fostering an environment of mutual improvement.
• You have experience building infrastructure at scale, 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 to database optimization and Kubernetes debugging.

Why You Should Not Apply

• You prefer prescriptive direction and expect managers to make final architectural decisions, rather than owning and being accountable for your projects.
• You dislike working with SQL, as the role involves optimizing data models and diving into reports.
• You are not keen on hands-on coding, as SREs are expected to actively contribute code at a platform level.
• Your primary mode of communication is live meetings; Ashby emphasizes async, written communication and code for sharing best practices.
• You require constant prodding for project updates, lacking the self-driven project management and scope-cutting skills necessary in a lean team.

Technology Stack

While prior experience with our stack is not required, familiarity is a plus:

• TypeScript (frontend & backend)
• Node.js
• React
• Apollo GraphQL
• Postgres
• Redis

Our infrastructure is 100% cloud-based (AWS), utilizing Datadog and Sentry for monitoring. We prioritize developer experience and reliability, with all engineers participating in a follow-the-sun on-call rotation and contributing to developer tooling.

What We're Building

Ashby was founded to revolutionize Talent Acquisition software, which traditionally lagged behind the needs of modern recruiting teams. We aim to provide intelligent, powerful tooling that automates and simplifies complex tasks, empowering TA teams with superior insights and capabilities.

Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture, rooted in the co-founders' belief in small, talented teams building high-quality software efficiently, is characterized by:

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

Engineers at Ashby run their projects end-to-end, taking problem briefs and driving solutions from research to implementation. Collaboration is natural among humble and kind lifelong learners, supported by research, prototyping, and written proposals. We value focus time, with engineers typically in less than 2 hours of meetings per week.

We meet in person twice a year (department and company-wide) and offer a budget for regional meetups. We achieve quality, breadth, and depth comparable to much larger teams through investment in great developer tooling (e.g., 10-minute CI/CD, 15+ daily deploys), robust debugging, and common building blocks (analytics, policy engine, workflow engine, design system).

Diversity

Ashby is committed to building a diverse workforce to drive innovation and better outcomes. Currently, 21% of engineers are from underrepresented groups, and we are actively working to improve this through diverse candidate sourcing, generous paid family leave, and no LeetCode interviews. We provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.

Interview Process

Ashby's interview process is designed to help you showcase your best self. It focuses on past projects, collaborative problem-solving (pair programming, spec writing), and technical decision-making, with no LeetCode or whiteboard exercises. The process includes:

• Introduction call with Hiring Manager (15-30m, live)
• Technical screen (1h, live, in actual codebase)
• Three non-coding interviews (3h 15m, live, focus on technical design, debugging, infrastructure)

A recruiter screen may precede these rounds. Your hiring manager will guide you, providing written guidance for each stage. You'll meet 4-6 engineers and receive feedback regardless of the outcome.

Your First Three Months at Ashby

Ashby provides an exceptional onboarding experience. Your dev environment is set up with a single script, and you'll push your first product change on day one. You'll then ship increasingly complex features to tour the codebase and best practices. Your manager will conduct 30, 60, and 90-day reviews, and a peer will be paired with you for support and collaboration. The team also runs training sessions on culture, product, engineering process, and technical architecture.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity with a 10-year exercise window.
• Unlimited PTO (encouraged use).
• Minimum 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave (may be longer per regional requirements outside the US).
• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget.
• $100/month education budget (conferences covered with approval).
• Top-tier health insurance for you and dependents (100% premiums covered by Ashby) in the US; high-quality supplemental health insurance fully covered outside the US.

Ashby is committed to fostering a happy, challenged, and high-performing environment.

Key skills/competency

• Platform Engineering
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Infrastructure-as-Code
• Cloud Infrastructure (AWS)
• Distributed Systems
• Scalability
• Database Optimization (Postgres)
• Security & Privacy
• Incident Management
• Developer Experience