Staff Platform Engineer

Staff Platform Engineer at Ashby

We’re seeking a curious, rigorous, and problem-hungry platform engineer (who codes!) to drive the evolution of Ashby’s platform. Ashby builds software that empowers talent teams to create efficient, delightful, and respectful hiring processes. As a Staff Platform Engineer, you will build a “paved road” that enables excellent engineering teams to scale safely and effectively.

Ashby boasts notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. Our growth and retention metrics are industry-leading, with tens of millions in ARR, over 100% year-over-year growth, over 2500 customers, very low churn, and substantial runway.

About The Role And How We Work

The infrastructure is currently stable, but Ashby's rapid growth continually tests its limits. We are committed to providing customers with powerful hiring software, which frequently necessitates new infrastructure development. We highly value code-as-infrastructure, meaning you'll dive into scaling challenges, enhance platform capabilities, and shape how the entire team interacts with infrastructure. All engineers own their projects end-to-end, shipping with minimal oversight, focusing on common sense security rather than unnecessary roadblocks. However, with great power comes great responsibility, as we handle personal and confidential data crucial to hiring decisions. As we expand, more and larger customers depend on our reliability and security, requiring our internal operations to evolve.

We are at a critical juncture where our ability to scale and deliver seamless experiences is paramount. We need a Staff Platform Engineer to make sound decisions, debug complex issues, and build a future-proof platform capable of managing significant growth. Our small, efficient infrastructure team has established a secure and straightforward environment for our growing product team. You will own projects end-to-end, impacting core aspects of the Ashby developer and user experience. Examples of potential work include:

• Optimizing our homegrown ultra-dynamic recruiting DSL-to-SQL compiler and developing developer tools.
• Creating 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 in collaboration with business and engineering teams.
• Ensuring all communication with external services supports retries and circuit-breakers.
• Implementing infrastructure to support an event-driven architecture and data warehouse.

We seek someone who can build mature, reliable, yet flexible and approachable systems. Balancing reliability with flexibility is crucial, as software availability is mission-critical. As an SRE in today's landscape, you must be comfortable evaluating and managing various risks.

Why You Should Apply

• You are relentlessly curious and obsessed with solving complex problems, meticulously investigating every detail until a solution emerges.
• You are committed to building robust, future-proof solutions, advocating for the user, edge cases, and resilient designs, viewing product engineers as allies.
• You care deeply about your work and team, seeking to collaborate with colleagues who foster mutual growth and improvement.
• You have experience building infrastructure at a slightly later stage, managing millions of data points, understanding infrastructure's impact on customer experience, and automating provisioning, monitoring, and release processes.
• You are a versatile problem-solver, embracing diverse challenges like infrastructure updates, security enforcement, database optimization, Kubernetes debugging, and TypeScript tracing, even if you're not an expert in all areas.

Why You Should Not Apply

• You prefer to have a lead or manager dictate the final architectural decisions rather than making your own choices for the platform's direction.
• You dislike SQL, as the role involves optimizing data features, advising on performant data models, and diving into complex reports.
• You are unwilling to code. Our SREs are skilled software engineers responsible for the application at a platform level, regularly reviewing and submitting code changes.
• Your primary method for communicating best practices is live meetings. Ashby operates with a strong asynchronous culture, relying on written communication and code for changes and sharing new tools and practices efficiently.
• You require constant prodding for project updates and have not independently delivered projects. We expect engineers to manage their projects, seek assistance when needed, and scope down work effectively without project managers.

Technology Stack

While previous experience isn't required, our tech stack includes: TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, Redis. We utilize Datadog and Sentry on a 100% cloud-based (AWS) infrastructure. 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

At Ashby, we observed a lack of effective tooling for Talent Acquisition teams, hindering their ability to manage complex hiring processes efficiently. As hiring managers and engineers, we recognized the potential for software to significantly improve this function. We built Ashby to provide TA teams with intelligent, powerful software that offers insights into challenges and automates or simplifies tasks, making other departments envious of their capabilities.

Engineering Culture

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

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

Engineers run their projects, taking problem briefs from Product Managers and executing end-to-end, including research, spec writing, wireframing, and implementation. We prioritize engineers pushing information and pulling in help over rigid processes. Collaboration is natural among our humble, kind, and talented lifelong learners. We maintain sacred focus time through thoughtful asynchronous communication, resulting in less than 2 hours of meetings per week for engineers. We meet in person twice a year, and a budget is provided for local meetups. We increase leverage through excellent developer tooling (e.g., ~10m CI/CD, 15+ deploys/day), an out-of-the-box debugger, and powerful, customizable building blocks (analytics modeling, query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system). We are committed to diversity, with conscious steps like sourcing diverse candidates, offering generous paid family leave, and avoiding LeetCode interviews, aiming to improve our current 21% representation of underrepresented engineers.

Interview Process

Our interview process is designed to help you showcase your best self, focusing on past projects and simulating collaborative work. There are no LeetCode or whiteboard exercises. The process consists of three rounds:

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

Depending on bandwidth, an additional 30m recruiter screen may precede these. Your hiring manager will be your main contact, providing guidance and preparation for each round. You’ll meet 4-6 engineering team members, with time to ask questions. We provide feedback to all candidates.

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 then incrementally ship product changes that tour our codebase and best practices. These changes increase in scope and ambiguity. Your manager conducts 30, 60, and 90-day reviews. A peer is paired with you for support, and the team conducts training sessions on culture, product, engineering process, and technical architecture.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity with a 10-year exercise window for stock options.
• Unlimited PTO with encouragement to use it.
• A minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave (longer if regional requirements apply).
• Generous budget for equipment, software, and office furniture.
• $100/month education budget, with conferences covered by manager approval.
• Top-tier health insurance for you and dependents (100% covered by Ashby in the US; high-quality supplemental coverage elsewhere).

Ashby is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and provides equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.

Key skills/competency

• Platform Engineering
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Cloud Infrastructure (AWS)
• Scaling Distributed Systems
• Infrastructure as Code
• TypeScript/Node.js
• Postgres/Redis
• Security Best Practices
• Developer Experience
• CI/CD & Deployment Strategies