Staff Product Engineer - Americas

About the role

We’re looking for a versatile, persistent product engineer who’s not afraid to set up reusable building blocks across the stack and advocate for the time and space to do so. At Ashby, all our engineers ship features end-to-end at a high pace. Example is the best leadership. We’ll give you the room to do your best work, and you'll be our guide!

What Ashby gives you in return is the best of both early and growth-stage environments. The agency and no-nonsense of a seed startup: you write product specs, make product and design decisions, and build in an almost-no-meeting culture. While also the product-market fit and scale of a growth-stage startup: 100,000+ weekly active users who depend on your software and eagerly await your next feature. 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, very low churn, and many years of runway.

Responsibilities

• Take ownership over a large portion of one of our products and own projects end-to-end (wearing hats traditionally worn by product and design).
• Research competitors, write product specs, make wireframes, and more.
• Design and build automated interview scheduling that automates scheduling by calculating possible times from a pool of interviewers and other constraints, and then presenting these times to the candidate for selection via our responsive web app.
• Build a generalized declarative filter architecture that allows users to create complex filters for any record with a consistent UI and compile it to SQL in our backend.
• Spec, design, and implement features that allow users to complete signing offers entirely within Ashby, including talking to customers to understand their requirements, deciding what technologies to use, building a prototype, and working with other team members to integrate the final implementation into additional features.

What we’re building

When we started Ashby, we saw that Talent Acquisition (TA) software held recruiting teams back instead of meeting their new standards. 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, identify qualified interviewers, perform “Calendar Tetris” to find availability, schedule on the earliest date possible, and make last-minute adjustments—all while considering interview load and training needs. TA software didn’t help.

As engineers, we knew software could do better. So we built Ashby to give TA teams intelligent, powerful software that provides insights and automates or simplifies tedious tasks. We want other functions to be jealous of what TA teams can do with Ashby, and today they often are!

As we’ve set the standard for excellence in TA software, HR teams have pulled us into solving their problems in areas like onboarding and performance management.

Why you should or shouldn’t apply

You’re not afraid to tackle any part of a technology stack. You do what’s necessary to successfully deliver a feature, whether writing frontend or choosing new infrastructure.

You’ve tackled projects with a lot of product and technical ambiguity, and you thrive at the intersection of the two.

You know how to strike the right balance between speed and quality.

You are ambitious and always looking to improve your skills.

You’re an excellent collaborator and communicator.

You seek to create leverage in your work through automation, abstractions, tools, and lint rules.

You shouldn’t apply if:

• To you, a tech lead, staff, or principal engineer is someone who spends most of their time project managing or doing architecture reviews.
• You need company-driven process and structure to get your projects across the finish line.
• You only want to do exciting work and avoid customer issues and investigations.
• You can get lost in the details and struggle to step back to think about the project as a whole.
• You like everything to be planned upfront.
• You haven’t led or taken ownership of projects before.
• You want to mentor earlier-career engineers (more than 90% of the team are Senior or above).

Engineering culture

Our engineering culture is motivated by the belief that a small, talented team, given the right environment, can build high-quality software fast (and work regular hours!). We do it through:

• 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

Minimal process & lots of ownership: The best engineers deliver reliably magical outcomes by taking customer problems and driving them to brilliant, creative solutions with minimal oversight. Stakeholders are never in the dark, and setbacks are never surprises. Traditional product-development processes aren’t meant for the best engineers—they stifle time and freedom, ingredients necessary for magical outcomes.

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 and pull folks in to help. It’s a new level of ownership for many engineers, but we’d rather an engineer fail a bit and coach up their skills than use process as a crutch.

Collaboration is natural & communication is deliberate: Our engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind. These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally. We combine this with research, prototyping, and written proposals to see around corners and get feedback from the team across time zones.