Staff Platform Engineer - UK in London

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.

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. 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.

For instance, you could work on:

• 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

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 later stage than Ashby is at – you know how to deal with millions of data points.
• You’re a Swiss army knife. You’ll get every hard problem the company faces.

Role

All that makes for a pretty specific kind of role, and the job isn’t to everyone’s tastes! 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.
• You hate SQL.
• You don’t want to code.
• Your primary mode of communicating best practices to engineers is live meetings.
• You’ve never delivered a project on your own, without someone prodding you for updates.

Technology Stack

TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, Redis. We use Datadog and Sentry on 100% cloud‑based (AWS) infra.

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.

Engineering Culture

Our Engineering Culture Is Motivated By Abhik And Benji’s belief that a small talented team can build high‑quality software fast and work regular hours.

Interview Process

At Ashby, our interview process wants 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.

Your First Three Months at Ashby

We want an exceptional onboarding experience for every new hire.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity
• 10‑year exercise window for stock options.
• Unlimited PTO, and we encourage you to take it
• A minimum of twelve weeks of fully paid parental leave, covered by Ashby.
• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget.
• $100 per month education budget with more expensive items such as conferences covered with manager approval.
• If you’re in the US, we offer top‑tier health insurance for you and your dependents.

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