Role Overview
I’m looking for an engineering manager to help us build a different type of engineering team and culture at Ashby. To accomplish this, our engineering leaders need to think deeply about individual performance, process, and culture - not running sprint planning or driving product and technical decisions. You’ll focus on building your team, their skills to thrive with the ownership they’re given, and an environment that empowers them to do their best work consistently, with little distraction. For junior EMs we try to stay within 6 direct reports. This enables them to spend time with our teams observing, correcting, praising, and, yes, coding. We like our managers to be hands-on while also making sure they’re not on the critical path.
Responsibilities
- Provide feedback on product and technical specs to help engineers identify where to cut scope or improve quality. You don’t make the final decisions, but you’ll influence and coach ICs to reach the right ones.
- Grow engineers to the point where they can take large, loosely defined projects, and deliver them with little intervention. They still ask for help when needed - the difference is that they’re driving.
- Jump into our systems and code to debug a customer issue, ship a small bug fix, or improve our developer experience. Engineering leaders at Ashby are great engineers and enjoy keeping their skills up-to-date (while staying off the critical path).
- Improve how we generate and simulate data in demo accounts. It’s a project off the critical path, but it helps you keep up-to-date on our codebase while immensely impacting the business, from Engineering to QA to Sales.
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!). 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
Benefits
- Competitive salary and equity.
- 10-year exercise window for stock options.
- 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.
- $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.
- $250/month tool budget plus access to Claude, Cursor, and Codex with generous token budgets.
- High-quality supplemental health insurance for you and your dependents, fully covered by us.
What We’re Looking For
- You love being technical and can hold in-depth conversations with direct reports from infra to backend to frontend.
- You enjoy management problems. We want people who get excited about driving people to be their best, giving difficult feedback, and building systems that make this easier.
- You hold your team to a high standard and don’t shy away from getting into the details and giving feedback, even to the best folks on your team.
- You are an excellent and empathetic communicator. Facilitating change at both an individual and organization level requires understanding how to navigate the beliefs, opinions, and past experiences of engineers.
- You know what exceptional engineers look like. You’ve thought deeply about what makes them tick, how to recruit them, and how to grow folks into them.
- You’re good at thinking about product, business, and maybe even design, but you’re not interested in calling the shots and are more interested in building a team that can make the best decisions without you.
- You thrive in high-trust, high-autonomy environments.
Technology Stack
We don’t require previous experience in our specific stack (but a love of typed languages is helpful): TypeScript (frontend & backend), React, GraphQL API, Node.js, Postgres, Redis.
