Engineering Manager - UK in Leeds

Hi I’m Colin, Director of Engineering, Europe. How do you feel about software engineers writing product specs, making product decisions, and not breaking down projects into individual tickets? If that sounds exciting (even if a bit scary), read on because I’m looking for an engineering manager to help us build a different type of engineering team and culture at Ashby.

To start, why do we need to be different? Time and again, I have witnessed engineers knowing what needs to be done yet being unable to get things done because of “the process” or because “more data is needed.” Some of the most effective projects have been skunkworks projects, where engineers have taken total ownership of a problem and driven it to completion. I want to normalize that at Ashby.

When we think about how these processes came about, we realize they carry a pessimistic mindset. They box people into smaller roles to minimize the chance of not meeting a certain standard. At Ashby, we’re building an environment that is optimistic about what engineers can own and achieve and embraces the innovative engineers (and frankly, often stays out of their way).

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. We’ve already gathered an experienced, talented, and collaborative team of 25+ engineers. You’ll help me manage the growing team of engineers in Europe.

In addition to working with engineers, you’ll also get to work on projects yourselves. Some examples of work our engineering leaders have done include:

• Provide feedback on product and technical specs to help engineers identify where to cut scope or improve quality.
• 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 a customer issue, ship a small bug fix, or improve our developer experience.
• Improve how we generate and simulate data in demo accounts.

Why be a manager? I had two experiences early in my career that set me on my path. I had a great manager who asked tonnes of questions about the decisions I was making and coached me without me realizing it. And I had a terrible manager – being told to work harder after a week of 3am finishes was not what I needed as a young engineer. The stark difference between these two experiences motivated me to become a manager: I wanted every engineer I worked with to have the support I had in the best case.

Since then, as I’ve learned more, I’ve realized that I love the kind of problems I get to solve as a manager. Deeply complex problems with long‑term impact both on the company and on people’s lives. One of my proudest achievements is creating a fully transparent pay system, and on the day it was revealed, everybody was happy with it. Nobody stormed out.

By spending time thinking deeply about everybody’s pay and ensuring the mechanics of promotion were clear, I put the team in a place where they could see a peer was paid more than them, and it not be a problem. Despite all this, I love being technical. I sometimes indulge myself and spend a morning writing some code to improve tests or provide better abstractions. If I couldn’t be a manager, I’d be super happy to be an IC.

I’m looking for someone who is passionate about both management and being technical. Someone who spots a pattern amongst their team, figures out a better way for us to operate, and then builds the automation that powers it. I introduced a new process that enables engineers to merge 30% of PRs without a human review beforehand. I also built the automation that approves these PRs.

It can be hard to find seasoned engineering leaders who haven’t succumbed to the status quo in some way or another. We're committed to giving all our people a total and utter lack of terrible managers, and that means we're willing to take a chance on someone early in their leadership journey who's courageous, principled, and has the drive to build themselves into a great leader.

Why You Should or Shouldn’t Apply

• You love being technical and can hold in-depth conversations with direct reports from infra to backend to frontend.
• You enjoy management problems.
• 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.
• You know what exceptional engineers look like.
• You’re good at thinking about product, business, and maybe even design, but you’re not interested in calling the shots.
• You thrive in high-trust, high-autonomy environments.

Put Another Way, You Shouldn’t Apply If

• You don’t enjoy coding or don’t find time to stay up-to-date on technology.
• You’ve gotten into management because it was the only growth path available.
• You want to make all the product decisions instead of empowering your team to make those calls.
• You’re not optimistic or convinced that we can build a large engineering team that functions differently than the status quo.

What We’re Building

Talent teams aspire to build a hiring process that identifies great candidates, moves them quickly through the interview process, and provides an excellent experience for the candidate. To accomplish this, recruiters perform thousands of daily tasks to coordinate and relay information between candidates, interviewers, and hiring managers.

Ashby provides talent teams with intelligent and powerful software that provides insights into where they’re failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they’re underwater with. We put a lot of effort into designing products that are approachable to beginners but mastered and extended by power users.

Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture is motivated by Abhik and Benji’s (our co‑founders) belief that a small talented team, given the right environment, can build high‑quality software fast (and work regular hours!). Collaboration is Natural, Communication is Deliberate.

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 can focus 36h out of a 40h work week.

We’ve 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 and AI-powered tooling.

Give Engineers Ownership & Autonomy

We, as engineers, find clever ways to solve problems, which amplifies when we deeply understand the problem. Our engineering culture reflects this experience: engineers own projects end‑to‑end, from speaking with users to writing product specs to UX design.

Put Effort into Diversity

Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Helping to build a more diverse team at Ashby is my way of contributing to this change. Today, 26% of engineers at Ashby are from underrepresented groups. It’s not great, and we are taking conscious steps to improve.

Interview Process

At Ashby, our team and interview process want to help you show your best self. Our interview process is six interviews in the following order:

• Intro Call (30m)
• Past Experience Deep Dive (1h)
• Technical Screen (1h)
• Coffee Chat with VP of Engineering (1h)
• Meet the Team (2h)

Technology Stack

I’m sharing our tech stack with the caveat that we don’t require previous experience: TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, Redis.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.
• 10-year exercise window for stock options.
• Unlimited PTO, and we will encourage you to take it.
• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget.
• $100/month education budget with more expensive items covered with manager approval.

Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.