Staff Platform Engineer - Americas

About The Role And How We Work

Ashby builds software that lets talent teams build an efficient, delightful, respectful hiring process. We have notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. Our growth and retention metrics are best-in-class among our peers: we have tens of millions in ARR, growing >100% year over year, over 2500 customers, very low churn, and many years of runway.

As a Platform Engineer at Ashby, you'll dive into scaling problems, add new capabilities to our platform, and think about how our entire team interacts with infrastructure. All our own engineers own their projects end-to-end and ship with minimal oversight. We don't put roadblocks to ensure security when common sense will do and we don't build processes like change management boards around the lowest common denominator. With great power comes great responsibility: we handle personal and confidential data about some of the biggest decisions we ever make at work.

We're at an inflection point where our ability to scale and deliver a seamless experience has a make-or-break impact – we have some of the fastest growing companies using our platform every day to hire hundreds of people per month. We need someone like you to make good decisions, debug thorny issues, and build us a future-proof platform that can withstand this scale.

What You Could Work On

• Optimize our homegrown ultra-dynamic recruiting DSL-to-SQL compiler, and create tools to help developers do so
• Create automated guardrails for the security and privacy of our customer data
• Help our developers ship features fast through canary deploys, gradual rollouts and feature flags, while keeping complexity manageable and reducing downtime
• Work with the business and the engineering team to define SLOs and implement the corresponding SLIs
• Ensure all communication with external services supports retries and circuit-breakers
• Implement the infrastructure to support an event-driven architecture and data warehouse

Who You Are

• You never stop. You get weirdly obsessed about a problem that doesn't yet make sense, turn it every which way in your head until the explanation dawns. You'll search every rock, inventory every clue, hunt every mismatch.
• You don't take shortcuts. You're speaking up for the future user, the edge case, the doomsday design. You know product engineers want to build it with you, and see them as allies, where you give them the power and knowledge to access greater things.
• You care about what you do and the team you do it with, and want to work with others who do as well. You'll be on interview panels choosing your next colleagues, and you'll take that seriously.
• You've built infrastructure at a slightly later stage than Ashby is at – you know how to deal with millions of data points, have seen great (or not great) infrastructure make or break customer experience, and have automated everything from provisioning to monitoring and release process.
• You're a Swiss army knife. You'll get every hard problem the company faces. You'll get to do infrastructure updates, security enforcements, database optimization, Kubernetes debugging, and digging through Typescript traces figuring out what doesn't work. You probably don't feel like an expert at at least some of that... and that appeals to you.

This Role Might Not Be For You If

• You don't want to make your own decisions on what is the best paved road to build for Ashby, and expect a lead or manager to make the final call on what that is
• You hate SQL
• You don't want to code
• Your primary mode of communicating best practices to engineers is live meetings
• You've never delivered a project, on your own, without someone prodding you for updates

Technology Stack

TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, Redis. We use Datadog and Sentry on 100% cloud-based (AWS) infra. We take developer experience and reliability seriously: all engineers are on call in a follow-the-sun model, and everyone contributes to developer tooling. We don't require previous experience in our stack.

What We're Building

When we started Ashby, we saw that recruiting teams were leveling up how they did their work, but instead of software meeting this new standard, it held them back. Scheduling a final round is an excellent example. Recruiting teams wanted to schedule candidates faster, track interviewer preparation and quality, and do it with half the headcount. A recruiter needed to manually collect availability from the candidate, identify qualified interviewers, perform "Calendar Tetris" to find who is available to interview the candidate, schedule on the earliest date possible, and make any last-minute adjustments as availability changed. They must do this while considering the interview load on each individual and whether interviewers need to be trained and shadowing others.

TA software didn't help. So we built and continue to build Ashby to give TA teams the highest standard of tooling – software that's intelligent and powerful, that provides insights into where they're failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they're underwater with.

Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture is motivated by our co-founders' belief that a small talented team, given the right environment, can build high-quality software fast (and work regular hours!).

• Minimal process with ownership over decisions normally made by product and design
• Natural collaboration and deliberate communication
• Investing in tools and abstractions that give us leverage
• 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 take on the rest: they research the problem, write product specs, build wireframes, and implement their solution end-to-end. We rely on engineers, not process, to push information outward to the relevant folks and pull folks in to help.

Our engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind. Focus time is something that we hold sacred, and with thoughtful and deliberate communication, engineers are in <2h meetings per week.