Staff Platform Engineer

About the Staff Platform Engineer Role at Ashby

We are seeking a curious, rigorous, and problem-hungry Staff Platform Engineer who enjoys coding to help scale Ashby to the next level. Ashby provides software that empowers talent teams to create efficient, delightful, and respectful hiring processes. As an engineer in this role, you will build a robust “paved road” that enables our engineering teams to deliver exceptional results safely and effectively.

Ashby boasts notable customers such as Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake, demonstrating strong market traction. We are experiencing rapid growth, with tens of millions in ARR, over 100% year-over-year growth, 2500+ customers, very low churn, and substantial financial runway. This role is crucial as we navigate this period of significant expansion.

This position is listed as both Platform Engineer and Site Reliability Engineer, as our team encompasses both functions, and we are open to candidates with a stronger inclination towards either area.

How We Work

Colin, Head of EMEA Engineering, emphasizes the importance of a talented infrastructure engineer in creating rigorous, disciplined, and smoothly operating systems. While Ashby’s current infrastructure is stable, rapid growth continually introduces new scaling challenges and demands for advanced platform capabilities to support evolving product features.

Ashby highly values code-as-infrastructure, and as a Staff Platform Engineer, you will address scaling problems, enhance platform capabilities, and shape how the entire team interacts with infrastructure. Engineers at Ashby own their projects end-to-end, shipping with minimal oversight. We prioritize common sense over rigid processes for security and avoid lowest common denominator process design. With this autonomy comes significant responsibility, especially when handling personal and confidential data. As our customer base grows, maintaining reliability and security becomes paramount, necessitating an evolving operational approach.

We are at an inflection point where scalable and seamless experiences are critical. Our platform supports fast-growing companies hiring hundreds monthly. We need a Staff Platform Engineer to make sound decisions, debug complex issues, and build a future-proof platform. Our small, efficient infrastructure team provides a secure and simple environment, avoiding unnecessary service sprawl. You will own projects end-to-end, directly impacting Ashby’s developer and user experience. Examples of potential projects include:

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

We seek someone capable of building mature, reliable, yet flexible and approachable systems. Balancing reliability with flexibility is key in today’s mission-critical software environment. An SRE must be adept at evaluating and managing risk.

Why You Should Apply

• You are intensely curious and persistent in solving complex problems, meticulously investigating every angle until a solution emerges. You’ll be supported with state-of-the-art monitoring and extensive data.
• You are committed to quality, advocating for the future user, edge cases, and robust designs. You see product engineers as allies, empowering them with knowledge and tools.
• You care deeply about your work and your team, and want to collaborate with like-minded individuals. You will be actively involved in interview panels to select 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 engineer, eager to tackle diverse challenges including infrastructure updates, security enforcement, database optimization, Kubernetes debugging, and Typescript trace analysis. This varied problem-solving appeals to you.

Why You Should Not Apply

• You prefer not to make independent decisions on the best platform strategy for Ashby, expecting a lead or manager to finalize such calls. While leads provide feedback, you will own and be accountable for your projects.
• You dislike SQL. Many features revolve around data, and platform engineers often optimize reports or advise on data models.
• You prefer not to code. Our SREs are skilled software engineers, responsible for the application at a platform level, with regular code reviews and contributions.
• 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.
• You require constant prompting for project updates. We lack project or delivery managers, so you must manage your own projects, seek help proactively, and manage scope.

Technology Stack

Our tech stack includes TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, and Redis. We use Datadog and Sentry on a 100% cloud-based (AWS) infrastructure. We prioritize developer experience and reliability; all engineers participate in a follow-the-sun on-call rotation and contribute to developer tooling.

What We’re Building

Ashby was founded to address the lack of sophisticated tooling in Talent Acquisition, a critical function often hindered by inadequate software. We aim to provide intelligent, powerful software that offers insights, automates tasks, and simplifies recruiting processes, making TA teams industry leaders in tooling.

Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture, inspired by co-founders Abhik and Benji, emphasizes a small, talented team building 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.
• Dedicated effort to building a diverse team.

Minimal Process & Lots of Ownership: We empower engineers to drive projects from problem brief to implementation, including research, spec writing, and wireframing, fostering magical outcomes and continuous skill development.

Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate: Our team consists of humble, kind, and talented lifelong learners. We utilize research, prototyping, and written proposals for effective cross-timezone feedback, preserving sacred focus time, resulting in engineers typically having less than 2 hours of meetings per week.

Increase Leverage, not Team Size: Ashby achieves quality, breadth, and depth comparable to much larger teams by investing in great developer tooling (e.g., ~10m CI/CD, 15+ daily deploys), out-of-the-box debuggers, and core building blocks (analytics, policy/workflow engines, design system) that cascade improvements throughout the app.

Put Effort into Diversity: We are committed to increasing diversity within engineering (currently 21% from underrepresented groups) through conscious steps like diverse candidate sourcing, generous paid family leave, and no leetcode interviews.

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 includes three rounds:

• Introduction Call: 15-30 minute live call with the Hiring Manager.
• Technical Screen: 1-hour live pair programming session in our actual codebase.
• Non-Coding Interviews: Three interviews (3 hours 15 minutes total, can be split) focusing on technical design, debugging incidents, and infrastructure.

An optional 30-minute recruiter screen may precede these rounds depending on leadership availability. Your hiring manager will be your main contact, providing guidance and minimal preparation materials. You will meet 4-6 engineers and have time for your 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 gradually tackle increasingly complex product changes. Your manager will conduct 30, 60, and 90-day reviews, and you’ll have a peer mentor for support, pair programming, and check-ins. The team will also provide training sessions on culture, product, engineering processes, and technical architecture.

Benefits

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

Ashby is committed to creating an environment where talented people are happy, challenged, and can do their best work. We provide equal employment opportunities to all, fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce.

Key skills/competency

• Platform Engineering
• Site Reliability Engineering
• Distributed Systems
• Cloud Infrastructure (AWS)
• TypeScript
• Node.js
• Postgres
• Kubernetes
• Automation
• System Design