About Ashby
Ashby is a fast-growing startup with tens of millions in ARR, growing over 100% year over year. We have notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. Our engineering culture strives to recreate the environments where we did our best work as ICs – where we had the ownership and agency to impact our users with creative and innovative software.
About the Role and How We Work
As a Product Engineer, you’ll 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). You’ll research competitors, write product specs, make wireframes, and more. Product engineers at Ashby have:
- Designed and built automated interview scheduling.
- Built a generalized declarative filter architecture.
- Specced, designed, and implemented a feature that allows users to complete signing offers entirely within Ashby.
What We’re Building
Ashby provides Talent Acquisition teams with intelligent and powerful software that offers insights and automates or simplifies many tasks. We aim to build the highest standard of tooling for TA teams, making other functions and departments jealous of what TA teams can do with Ashby.
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 achieve this 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
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.
Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate
Our engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind. This creates 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. Focus time is something that we hold sacred, and, with thoughtful and deliberate communication, engineers are in <2h meetings per week.
We also meet in person at least twice a year, once as a department and once as a company. You also have a small budget to meet up with folks in your city/region.
Increase Leverage, not Team Size
We built Ashby with the quality, breadth, and depth that many customers would expect from much larger teams over larger time scales. We’ve done this through investment in:
- Great developer tooling. Our CI/CD takes ~10m, and we deploy at least 15x a day. A debugger that works out of the box. Everyone on the team has contributed to our developer experience.
- Building blocks to create powerful and customizable products fast. At the core of Ashby is a set of common components (analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) that we constantly improve. Each improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app.
Put Effort into Diversity
Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. We are taking conscious steps to improve, like sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, no leetcode interviews, and more.
Interview Process
At Ashby, our team and interview process want to help you show your best self. We’ll dive into past projects and simulate working together via pair programming, writing product and tech specs collaboratively, and talking through decisions. There are no leetcode or whiteboard exercises.
Our interview process is three rounds:
- Introduction call with Hiring Manager (15 to 30m, live)
- A technical screen where we pair in our actual codebase (1h, live)
- Three non-coding interviews that focus on product thinking, technical design, and infrastructure (3h 15m, live can be split across multiple days)
Depending on our leadership team’s bandwidth, we may start with an additional 30m screen with a recruiter.
Your hiring manager will be your main point of contact and prep you for interviews. Each round will have written guidance so you know what to expect (you’ll need minimal preparation). You’ll meet 4 to 6 people in engineering (with 5-15 minutes in each interview to ask them questions). If we don’t give an offer, we’ll provide feedback!
Your First Three Months at Ashby
We want an exceptional onboarding experience for every new hire. At Ashby, your dev environment is set up with a single script, you push your first product change on day one, and you spend the rest of your time shipping product changes that give you a tour of our codebase and best practices. The product changes increase in scope and ambiguity from simple copy changes to the delivery of a prominent, impactful feature. Your manager will do a 30, 60, and 90-day review to give feedback and calibrate on how we work together.
It’s a team effort to get you successfully onboarded; you’ll have a peer paired with you to answer questions, pair program, and check in often to see if you need help. The rest of the team will run training sessions on our culture, product, engineering process, and technical architecture.
Technology Stack
We use TypeScript (frontend & backend), React, GraphQL API, Node.js, Postgres, Redis. We care more about fundamentals (e.g., debugging, abstractions) and how fast you learn.
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. We’ll provide a supportive environment to do it successfully (e.g., design system, SRE team).
- You’ve tackled projects with a lot of product and technical ambiguity, and you thrive at the intersection of the two. We’re not building a simple CRUD app, and many of the challenges we tackle require you to use your knowledge of our customers to build powerful abstractions and flexibility in the system to solve a class of problems.
- You know how to strike the right balance between speed and quality. Ashby wasn’t built quickly. We took four years to launch publicly because convincing customers to switch required a high-quality product. However, time isn’t infinite, especially for a startup, so we still move with urgency—we’ve built the equivalent of three or more VC-backed startups with a very small team.
- You are ambitious and always looking to improve your skills. For most engineers, this role will give you more freedom and responsibilities than you’ve experienced in the past. To thrive (and level up), you’ll need to be open to feedback (and we give lots of it).
- You’re an excellent collaborator and communicator. Ownership and freedom don’t mean you work in a vacuum. You’ll need to vet your decisions with the appropriate stakeholders, keep them up to date when necessary, and work with other engineers to get your projects across the finish line. Clear and concise communication helps a lot here!
- You seek to create leverage in your work. The nature of software is that you can often automate or abstract what would be tedious, time-consuming work. Your impatience usually leads to new abstractions, tools to allow Support to debug before Engineering, new lint rules to prevent common bugs, etc.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and equity.
- 10-year exercise window for stock options. You shouldn’t feel pressure to purchase stock options if you leave Ashby —do it when you feel financially comfortable.
- Unlimited PTO, and we will encourage you to take it.
- A minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, covered by Ashby. For folks outside the US, it may be longer to be in line with regional requirements.
- Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. Get what you need to be happy and productive!
- $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.
- If you’re in the US, we offer top-tier health insurance for you and your dependents, with 100% of premiums covered by Ashby. In other countries, we provide high-quality supplemental health insurance for you and your dependents, also fully covered by us.
Why You Should or Shouldn’t Apply (Requirements)
- 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. We’ll provide a supportive environment to do it successfully (e.g., design system, SRE team).
- You’ve tackled projects with a lot of product and technical ambiguity, and you thrive at the intersection of the two. We’re not building a simple CRUD app, and many of the challenges we tackle require you to use your knowledge of our customers to build powerful abstractions and flexibility in the system to solve a class of problems.
- You know how to strike the right balance between speed and quality. Ashby wasn’t built quickly. We took four years to launch publicly because convincing customers to switch required a high-quality product. However, time isn’t infinite, especially for a startup, so we still move with urgency—we’ve built the equivalent of three or more VC-backed startups with a very small team.
- You are ambitious and always looking to improve your skills. For most engineers, this role will give you more freedom and responsibilities than you’ve experienced in the past. To thrive (and level up), you’ll need to be open to feedback (and we give lots of it).
- You’re an excellent collaborator and communicator. Ownership and freedom don’t mean you work in a vacuum. You’ll need to vet your decisions with the appropriate stakeholders, keep them up to date when necessary, and work with other engineers to get your projects across the finish line. Clear and concise communication helps a lot here!
- You seek to create leverage in your work. The nature of software is that you can often automate or abstract what would be tedious, time-consuming work. Your impatience usually leads to new abstractions, tools to allow Support to debug before Engineering, new lint rules to prevent common bugs, etc.
Put another way, you shouldn’t apply if:
- You need company-driven process and structure to get your projects across the finish line. Sprint planning and well-defined project management processes are things you need or look to others to lead. You’d rather focus on the technical details and challenges.
- You only want to do exciting work. We’re building a team of kind, collaborative folks. Customer issues and investigations are distributed across the team, including our high-level ICs.
- You can get lost in the details. Once you start implementation, it can be hard to take a step back and 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’re used to working with tech leads and taking on tasks distributed by them.
- You want to mentor earlier-career engineers. We rely on engineers owning their projects, so we need engineers with that experience. This requires the team to be reasonably tenured. More than 90% of the team would be considered Senior or above in the industry today, so mentorship opportunities are very limited.
- To you, a tech lead, staff, or principal engineer is someone who spends most of their time project managing or doing architecture reviews. Our most tenured engineers spend most of their time building, and we often trust them with our most challenging problems. While they lead product and technical areas and help other engineers plan their most challenging work, it’s not a requirement, nor do engineers need their sign-off.
