Engineering Manager - Americas

About the role

Ashby’s Co-Founder and VP of Engineering is looking for a great former engineer who built impressive products and now builds teams of great engineers. Ashby’s success and ambition mean we’re doubling the Engineering team in the next year, and we need your experience and leadership to do it thoughtfully.

As an Engineering Manager, you’ll work closely with the Co-Founders and your peers to build out the team and continue scaling this unique culture.

What you'll do

• Manage three to five engineers and hire three to five more across multiple teams and specializations, from Product Engineers to Site Reliability Engineers to Design Engineers
• Provide feedback on product and technical specs to help engineers identify where to cut scope or improve quality; influence and coach ICs to reach the right decisions rather than making final decisions yourself
• Grow engineers to the point where they can take large, loosely defined projects and deliver them with little intervention
• Jump into our systems and code to debug customer issues, ship small bug fixes, or improve our developer experience
• Propose and lead department and company-wide initiatives such as rethinking pull request reviews, designing and improving interviews, or improving how we generate and simulate data in demo accounts

Engineering culture

Ashby achieves incredible speed and quality by discarding many industry norms and being optimistic about engineers. The culture is built on minimal process with ownership over decisions normally made by product and design, natural collaboration and deliberate communication, investing in tools and abstractions that give leverage, and putting effort into building a diverse team.

At Ashby, every engineer runs their project. Product Managers and Designers build strategy, do customer research, and hand off problem briefs to Engineers. Engineers research the problem, write product specs, build wireframes, and implement their solution end-to-end. The team relies on engineers, not process, to push information outward and pull in relevant folks for help.

Engineers are in fewer than 2 hours of meetings per week, with focus time held sacred. The team meets in person at least twice a year, and there is a small budget to meet up with folks in your city or region.

Investment in great developer tooling includes CI/CD that takes ~10 minutes with 15+ deploys per day, a debugger that works out of the box, building blocks for powerful and customizable products (analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system), and AI-powered tooling that auto-triages customer issues, suggests fixes, prototypes ideas, generates production-ready code, and conducts code reviews with unlimited token budget.

Who you are

• Love the craft of engineering and never give it up
• Have the ambition, courage, and follow-through to change things within your own team or across departments
• Could have been (or were) a Principal engineer
• Thrive with a team of engineers who take ownership and autonomy, including staff and principal engineers who lead by example and create leverage through their work
• Optimistic about building a large engineering team that functions differently from the status quo, without defaulting to sprint planning or product managers writing in-depth specifications at scale

Why you shouldn't apply

• You don’t enjoy coding or don’t find time to stay up-to-date on technology
• You follow the rules and accept the hand you’ve been dealt
• You went into management because it was the only growth path available
• You're happy with a team of engineers who are predominantly early-career or mid-career or don't thrive with ownership or autonomy
• You believe staff and principal engineers spend most of their time project managing or conducting architecture reviews
• You’re not optimistic that we can build a large engineering team that functions differently from the status quo, or you think at some size compromises have to be made for hiring numbers or consistency

Interview process

Total interview time is 5 hours 15 minutes:

• Introduction call with Ben (30 minutes, live)
• Technical screen pairing in our actual codebase (1 hour, live)
• Interview with Ben exploring past experience as a leader (1 hour, live)
• Interview with Abhik, VP of Engineering (45 minutes, live)
• Interview with Colin, Head of Engineering EMEA (30 minutes, live)
• Final round meeting Engineers and other Engineering Managers (90 minutes, live)

There may be an additional 30-minute screen with a recruiter. Reference checks are done near the end. Coffee chats in person or over Zoom are available to get to know each other. If we don’t move forward, we’re happy to share feedback.

Your first six months

Your first three months at Ashby will be spent learning about Ashby Engineering and easing into leadership by being an IC—learning how ICs work by being one.