Staff Platform Engineer - UK in Glasgow

We’re looking for a curious, rigorous, problem-hungry platform engineer (who codes!) to carry the ball as we bring Ashby to the big leagues. Ashby builds software that lets talent teams build an efficient, delightful, respectful hiring process. Similarly, you’re an engineer who wants to build a “paved road” that excellent engineering teams can safely take to the moon and back.

About The Role And How We Work

Hi I’m Colin, Head of EMEA Engineering. I’ve spent a number of years leading engineering teams in startups, and that has always included being close to infrastructure teams - no matter what name they’ve worn (SRE, infrastructure, platform, etc). I’ve got my hands dirty building the initial infrastructure for startups and know the value a talented infrastructure engineer brings. The rigour, the discipline, the peace and quiet when everything just hums along.

Our infrastructure is in a good place for now. Nothing is static. Ashby continues to grow rapidly, putting strain on our existing infrastructure. We’re always looking to give our customers more powerful hiring software, and building new product features often requires new pieces of infrastructure. Having herded plenty of snowflakeservers in the past, I’ve learned there’s a better way. I place a lot of value on infrastructure-as-code.

As a Platform Engineer at Ashby, you’ll get to 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. But with great power comes great responsibility: we handle personal and confidential data about some of the biggest decisions we ever make at work.

As we grow, more and bigger customers rely on us to be reliable and secure and how we operate internally will need to evolve. 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.

Our small but mighty infrastructure team has set up a secure and simple environment (we don’t believe in spinning up a new service unless necessary!) for our growing product team to build in. That’s where you come in: you, too, will own projects end-to-end and have an impact on core parts of the Ashby developer and user experience.

Core Responsibilities

• 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.

We’re looking for someone who can build systems that an engineer would like to work with: mature and boring but open-minded and approachable. We have to balance reliability with flexibility. Software and its availability are now mission critical to almost every working professional. To be in an SRE in today’s world, you have to be extremely comfortable evaluating risk, those you take and those others take.

Why you should or shouldn’t apply

You Should Apply If

• 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 don’t take shortcuts. You’re speaking up for the future user, the edge case, the doomsday design.
• You’re someone who cares about what you do and the team you do it with, and want to work with others who do as well.
• 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 (all nationalities welcome). You’ll get every hard problem the company faces.

You Should Not Apply 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. We have a lot of features built around making the best out of data.
• You don’t want to code. Our SREs are some of our best software engineers and they are just as responsible for the application as the other engineering teams – albeit at a platform level.
• Your primary mode of communicating best practices to engineers is live meetings. We’re a very async culture and written communication (and code) is how changes get made.
• You’ve never delivered a project, on your own, without someone prodding you for updates.

Technology Stack

I’m sharing our tech stack with the caveat that we don’t require previous experience in it: 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.

What We’re Building

As engineers, we are used to tooling that makes us better at what we do. When we started Ashby, we saw the opposite with Talent Acquisition software. Recruiting teams were leveling up how they did their work, but instead of software meeting this new standard, it held them back.

Ashby’s success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. We’re being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. I hope that excites you enough to apply.

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.

Compensation Range: £138K - £224K