Staff Software Engineer, Product Engineering

About the Staff Software Engineer, Product Engineering Role at Ashby

Ashby is seeking an ambitious full-stack engineer who is laser-focused on solving customer problems and making the right long-term investments for current and future features and products. This role offers the best of both early and growth-stage environments: the agency and no-nonsense culture of a seed startup, where you write product specs, make product and design decisions, and build in an almost-no-meeting environment. Simultaneously, you'll experience the product-market fit and scale of a growth-stage startup, impacting tens of thousands of daily users who depend on your software and eagerly await your next feature. Ashby boasts notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake, with tens of millions in ARR, growing over 100% year over year, very low churn, and many years of runway.

We are continuously expanding the team and bubbling with ideas to support Talent Acquisition through software, and building products beyond TA. We read every application and aim to respond within 3-4 days.

Our Engineering Culture and How We Work

Our engineering culture strives to recreate environments where ICs do their best work – where engineers have the ownership and agency to impact users with creative and innovative software. This means acting as a product manager and designer, talking to users, conceptualizing ideas, conducting industry research, designing interfaces, prototyping, and iterating based on user feedback. We value solving problems, not just tickets, fostering creativity and fulfillment through significant agency and ownership.

Ashby builds an environment optimistic about what engineers can own and achieve, embracing innovative engineers and often staying out of their way. As a Product Engineer, you'll own a large portion of a product and manage projects end-to-end, taking on roles traditionally handled by product and design. This includes researching competitors, writing product specs, and creating wireframes.

Examples of projects product engineers at Ashby have tackled include:

• Designed and built automated interview scheduling, solving the “Calendar Tetris” problem by calculating optimal times from interviewer pools and constraints.
• Built a generalized declarative filter architecture allowing users to create complex filters for any record with a consistent UI.
• Specced, designed, and implemented a feature enabling users to complete signing offers entirely within Ashby, involving customer research, technology selection, prototyping, and team integration.

What We’re Building

We recognized that Talent Acquisition software often lagged behind the evolving needs of recruiting teams, creating a disconnect where software hindered rather than helped. We're building Ashby to provide TA teams with intelligent, powerful tooling that offers insights, automates tedious tasks, and simplifies complex processes, making other functions envious of what TA teams can achieve.

Why You Should or Shouldn’t Apply

This role is ideal for engineers who:

• Are not afraid to tackle any part of a technology stack, delivering features successfully regardless of frontend or infrastructure needs.
• Thrive at the intersection of product and technical ambiguity, building powerful abstractions for complex problems.
• Know how to balance speed and quality, demonstrating urgency while maintaining high product standards.
• Are ambitious and eager to improve skills, open to feedback, and ready for greater freedom and responsibility.
• Are excellent collaborators and communicators, vetting decisions with stakeholders and working effectively with others.
• Seek to create leverage in their work, automating or abstracting tedious tasks to improve efficiency.

You might not thrive here if you:

• Need company-driven process and structure to complete projects.
• Prefer to focus only on exciting work, avoiding customer issues or investigations.
• Tend to get lost in technical details during implementation, needing everything planned upfront.
• Haven’t led or taken ownership of projects before and prefer tasks distributed by tech leads.
• Want to mentor earlier-career engineers; our team is highly tenured, limiting mentorship opportunities.
• Believe a staff/principal engineer primarily project manages or does architecture reviews, as our most tenured engineers are hands-on builders.

Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture, driven by the belief that a small, talented team can build high-quality software fast while working regular hours, is achieved through:

• Minimal process with engineers owning product and design decisions.
• Natural collaboration and deliberate communication.
• Investing in tools and abstractions for leverage.
• Putting effort into building a diverse team.

We encourage engineers to run their projects, with Product Managers and Designers providing strategy and problem briefs. Engineers then research, spec, wireframe, and implement solutions end-to-end, pushing information and pulling in help as needed. This fosters a high level of ownership and growth.

Collaboration occurs naturally among our humble, kind, and talented lifelong learners. We combine this with research, prototyping, and written proposals to gather feedback across time zones. Focus time is sacred, with thoughtful communication limiting engineers to less than 2 hours of meetings per week. We also meet in person twice a year and offer a budget for regional meetups.

We achieve breadth and depth with a small team by investing in great developer tooling (e.g., ~10m CI/CD, 15x daily deploys), a debugger that works out of the box, and building blocks like a common analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, and design system that cascade improvements throughout the app.

Ashby is committed to diversity, with 21% of engineers from underrepresented groups, and we are taking conscious steps to improve this through diverse sourcing, generous paid family leave, and no LeetCode interviews.

Interview Process

Our three-round interview process helps you showcase your best self:

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

An additional 30m recruiter screen may occur. Your hiring manager will be your main point of 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, you push your first product change on day one, and you continue shipping impactful changes that tour the codebase and best practices. Scope and ambiguity increase over time. Your manager provides 30, 60, and 90-day reviews, and a peer is paired with you for support. The team runs training sessions on culture, product, engineering process, and technical architecture.

Technology Stack

While not strictly required, a love of typed languages is helpful. Our stack includes TypeScript (frontend & backend), React, GraphQL API, Node.js, Postgres, and Redis. We value fundamentals and learning speed over previous stack experience, as many engineers have successfully switched from other languages and platforms.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.
• 10-year exercise window for stock options.
• Unlimited PTO with encouragement to take it.
• Minimum 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave (longer if regional requirements dictate).
• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget.
• $100/month education budget, with conferences covered by manager approval.
• Top-tier health insurance for US employees and dependents, 100% covered. High-quality supplemental health insurance for non-US employees and dependents, fully covered.

Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce.