Staff Platform Engineer

Staff Platform Engineer at Ashby

We’re seeking a curious, rigorous, and problem-hungry platform engineer who codes to help scale Ashby to the next level. Ashby specializes in building software that empowers talent teams to create efficient, delightful, and respectful hiring processes. In this role, you will be instrumental in building a “paved road” that enables excellent engineering teams to operate seamlessly and effectively.

Ashby serves notable customers such as Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. We boast best-in-class growth and retention metrics, with tens of millions in ARR, over 100% year-over-year growth, more than 2500 customers, very low churn, and substantial runway. We are actively hiring for this critical position to support our continued expansion.

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

About The Role And How We Work

Colin, Head of EMEA Engineering, brings years of experience leading engineering teams in startups, consistently working closely with infrastructure teams under various names. He understands the value of a talented infrastructure engineer: the rigor, discipline, and the quiet efficiency when everything works harmoniously.

While our current infrastructure is robust, Ashby’s rapid growth continuously challenges its limits. We are committed to providing our customers with powerful hiring software, which often necessitates new infrastructure components to support innovative product features.

Having managed countless 'snowflake' servers in the past, Ashby champions a code-as-infrastructure philosophy. As a Staff Platform Engineer, you will dive into scaling challenges, add new platform capabilities, and shape how our entire team interacts with infrastructure. Our engineers own their projects end-to-end and ship with minimal oversight, avoiding unnecessary roadblocks or cumbersome change management processes. This autonomy comes with significant responsibility, especially as we handle personal and confidential data crucial to major career decisions. Our growth demands increasing reliability and security, and our internal operations must evolve accordingly.

We are at a pivotal moment where scaling and delivering a seamless experience are critical. Some of the fastest-growing companies rely on our platform daily to hire hundreds of people. We need someone who can make sound decisions, debug complex issues, and build a future-proof platform capable of withstanding this scale. Our small but mighty infrastructure team has established a secure and simple environment, minimizing new services unless essential, for our growing product team. You will own projects end-to-end, impacting core aspects of the Ashby developer and user experience. Examples of your potential work include:

• Optimizing our homegrown ultra-dynamic recruiting DSL-to-SQL compiler and creating developer tools for it.
• Creating automated guardrails for the security and privacy of customer data.
• Helping developers ship features rapidly through canary deploys, gradual rollouts, and feature flags, while managing complexity and reducing downtime.
• Collaborating with business and engineering teams to define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and implement corresponding Service Level Indicators (SLIs).
• Ensuring all communication with external services supports retries and circuit-breakers.
• Implementing the infrastructure to support an event-driven architecture and data warehouse.

We seek someone capable of building systems that engineers enjoy working with: mature, stable, yet open-minded and approachable. This role demands balancing reliability with flexibility. With software and its availability being mission-critical, an SRE today must be exceptionally comfortable evaluating various risks.

Why you should or shouldn’t apply

You Should Apply If:

• You are relentlessly curious, obsessed with unraveling complex problems, and diligent in your pursuit of solutions, leveraging state-of-the-art monitoring tools and extensive data.
• You are meticulous, advocating for future users, edge cases, and robust designs, viewing product engineers as allies in building greater capabilities.
• You are passionate about your work and your team, seeking to collaborate with individuals who inspire growth and elevate collective performance. You will actively participate in selecting future colleagues.
• You have experience with infrastructure at a slightly later stage than Ashby currently is, adept at handling millions of data points, understanding infrastructure's impact on customer experience, and automating provisioning, monitoring, and release processes.
• You are a versatile 'Swiss army knife' engineer, eager to tackle diverse challenges from infrastructure updates and security enforcement to database optimization, Kubernetes debugging, and TypeScript tracing. Embracing new challenges where you might not yet be an expert is appealing to you.

You Should Not Apply If:

• You prefer having a lead or manager make final decisions on platform strategy, rather than defining the best 'paved road' yourself and being accountable for it.
• You dislike SQL, given our data-centric features and the need for platform engineers to optimize reports and advise on data models.
• You are unwilling to code. Our SREs are top-tier software engineers, responsible for the application at a platform level, regularly reviewing and submitting code changes.
• Your primary mode of communicating best practices is live meetings. Ashby operates on a highly asynchronous culture, relying on written communication and code for changes and sharing new tools and practices efficiently.
• You require constant prompting for project updates and lack the initiative to self-manage projects, seek help, or adjust scope as needed, as we do not have project or delivery managers.

Technology Stack

While prior experience with our exact tech stack is not required, we utilize TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, and Redis. Our infrastructure is 100% cloud-based (AWS), with Datadog and Sentry for observability. We prioritize developer experience and reliability, with all engineers participating in a follow-the-sun on-call model and contributing to developer tooling.

What We’re Building

As engineers, we are accustomed to tooling that enhances our productivity. We founded Ashby because we observed the opposite in Talent Acquisition software, where systems hindered recruiting teams despite their evolving needs. For instance, scheduling a final interview round traditionally involved a manual, complex process of coordinating availability, identifying interviewers, managing calendars, and making adjustments, all while considering interviewer load and training needs. This inefficiency was rampant across TA software.

Recognizing TA as a critical function and the potential for better software, we built Ashby to empower TA teams with intelligent, powerful tooling. Our software provides insights into hiring processes and automates or simplifies numerous tasks, making other functions envious of what TA teams achieve with Ashby.

Engineering Culture

Our engineering 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 quickly and maintain regular hours. We achieve this through:

• Minimal process with significant ownership over product and design decisions.
• Natural collaboration and deliberate communication.
• Investment in tools and abstractions for increased leverage.
• Dedicated effort towards building a diverse team.

Minimal Process & Lots of Ownership

The most effective engineers deliver consistently exceptional outcomes, transforming customer problems into brilliant and creative solutions with minimal oversight, while keeping stakeholders informed. Traditional product development processes, designed for consistency regardless of skill, often stifle top engineers by consuming their time and freedom—elements crucial for generating magical outcomes. At Ashby, we foster an environment where every engineer can excel. Engineers run their own projects, taking problem briefs from Product Managers and owning the research, spec writing, wireframing, and end-to-end implementation. We rely on engineers to proactively share information and seek help, prioritizing skill development over process as a crutch. While not everyone thrives, those who do experience significant growth.

Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate

Our engineering team comprises talented, humble, and kind lifelong learners, fostering natural collaboration. We utilize research, prototyping, and written proposals to anticipate challenges and gather feedback across time zones. We revere focus time, and through thoughtful, deliberate communication, engineers typically spend less than two hours in meetings weekly. We also host in-person meetings twice a year (department and company-wide) and offer a budget for local team meetups.

Increase Leverage, not Team Size

Ashby has achieved the quality, breadth, and depth expected from much larger teams and longer timelines by investing in:

• Exceptional developer tooling, enabling ~10m CI/CD times and over 15 deployments daily.
• An out-of-the-box debugger, with every team member contributing to developer experience.
• Robust building blocks (analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) that continuously improve and cascade benefits throughout our application.

Put Effort into Diversity

Diverse teams drive innovation and superior outcomes. Inspired by personal experiences, we are committed to creating opportunities for engineers from underrepresented groups. Currently, 21% of Ashby engineers are from underrepresented groups. We are actively improving this through diverse candidate sourcing, generous paid family leave, and avoiding LeetCode interviews.

Interview Process

Ashby's interview process is designed to help you showcase your best self. We delve into past projects and simulate collaborative work through pair programming, joint product/tech spec writing, and decision-making discussions. There are no LeetCode or whiteboard exercises. The process consists of three rounds:

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

Depending on leadership bandwidth, an additional 30-minute recruiter screen may be added. Your hiring manager will be your primary contact, providing preparation guidance and written expectations for each round. You will meet 4 to 6 engineers, with dedicated time for your questions. We provide feedback to all candidates, including those not receiving an offer.

Your First Three Months at Ashby

We ensure an exceptional onboarding experience. Your dev environment is set up with a single script, you push your first product change on day one, and you spend the initial months shipping changes that tour our codebase and best practices. These product changes progressively increase in scope and ambiguity, from simple copy edits to prominent feature delivery. Your manager will conduct 30, 60, and 90-day reviews for feedback and alignment. A peer mentor will provide support, pair programming, and regular check-ins. The team will also run training sessions on our culture, product, engineering process, and technical architecture.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.
• 10-year exercise window for stock options, allowing financial comfort for purchase.
• Unlimited PTO, with active encouragement to use it.
• Minimum 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, covered by Ashby (potentially longer for regional compliance outside the US).
• 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.
• For US employees, top-tier health insurance for you and dependents, with 100% of premiums covered by Ashby. For employees in other countries, high-quality supplemental health insurance for you and dependents, also fully covered.

Ashby's success stems from hiring great people and fostering an environment where we are happy, challenged, and perform our best work. We are deliberately building this environment from the ground up, and we hope you are excited to apply.

Key skills/competency

• Platform Engineering
• Site Reliability Engineering
• Cloud Infrastructure (AWS)
• TypeScript/Node.js
• PostgreSQL
• Scalability
• System Design
• Infrastructure-as-Code
• Developer Experience
• Observability (Datadog/Sentry)