Principal Software Engineer, Product Engineering, EU, UK in Manchester

Hi I’m Abhik, Ashby’s Co-Founder and VP of Engineering. We’re looking for an ambitious full-stack engineer who is laser-focused on solving customer problems and making the right long-term investments to solve them not only today but in our future features and products.

What Ashby gives you in return is the best of both early and growth-stage environments. The agency and no-nonsense of a seed startup: you write product specs, make product and design decisions, and build in an almost-no-meeting culture. While also the product-market fit and scale of a growth-stage startup: tens of thousands of daily users who depend on your software and eagerly await your next feature.

We have notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. Our growth and retention metrics are best-in-class among our peers: we have tens of millions in ARR, growing >100% year over year, very low churn, and many years of runway.

You’ve probably seen this role posted before, and it’s because we’re always expanding the team (we’re on track to double this year). We’re bubbling with ideas on how to support Talent Acquisition through software, and we’ve started the journey of building products beyond Talent Acquisition.

About the Role and How We Work

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.

I started my career building software for artists in the Visual Effects industry. It was a formative experience for me as a software engineer because success relied on my ability to be a product manager and designer. I talked to artists to understand their needs. I came up with ideas. I did industry research, designed interfaces, and prototyped ideas. I watched artists use what I built and decided what to tackle in the next iteration. No daily stand‑ups, no t‑shirt sizing, no planning meetings.

I studied computer science to solve problems, not tickets, and this felt exactly like that. I not only felt creative and fulfilled but the agency and ownership we were given as engineers powered an incredible amount of innovation.

Innovation came differently (or not at all) at technology startups beyond the seed stage, often through an engineer’s force of will and ability to push back against culture (rather than any encouragement from it). Engineering was narrowed to implementation and delivery, partly due to the influence of other departments and partly due to the influx of “Agile” processes like sprint planning. In those companies, I felt like a JIRA jockey.

At Ashby, we’re building an environment that is optimistic about what engineers can own and achieve. An environment that embraces innovative engineers, and, frankly, often stays out of their way. 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.

To ground it with examples, product engineers at Ashby have:

• Designed and built automated interview scheduling. This feature automates scheduling by calculating possible times from a pool of interviewers and other constraints, and then presenting these times to the candidate for selection via our responsive web app.
• Built a generalized declarative filter architecture that allows users to create complex filters for any record with a consistent UI and compile it to SQL in our backend.
• Specced, designed, and implemented a feature that allows users to complete signing offers entirely within Ashby.

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.

Scheduling a final round is an excellent example. Recruiting teams wanted to schedule candidates faster, track interviewer preparation and quality, and do it with half the headcount. A recruiter needed to manually collect availability from the candidate, identify qualified interviewers, perform “Calendar Tetris” to find who is available to interview the candidate, schedule on the earliest date possible, and make any last‑minute adjustments as availability changed.

As hiring managers, we know TA is a critical function, and as engineers, we know software can do better. So, we built and continue to build Ashby to give TA teams the highest standard of tooling. Software that’s intelligent and powerful. Software that provides insights into where they’re failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they’re underwater with.

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.

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.

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.

Put another way, you shouldn’t apply if:

• You need company‑driven process and structure to get your projects across the finish line.
• You only want to do exciting work.
• You can get lost in the details.
• You haven’t led or taken ownership of projects before.
• You want to mentor earlier‑career engineers.

Engineering Culture

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.

The best engineers we’ve worked with delivered reliably magical outcomes. They took customer problems and relentlessly drove them to solutions that were not only successful but often brilliant and creative.

At Ashby, we want to build an environment that encourages every engineer to be their best. So, at Ashby, every Engineer runs their project. Product Managers (and Designers) build strategy, do customer research, and hand off problem briefs to Engineers.

Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate. Our engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind. These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally.

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.

Put Effort into Diversity. Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Today, 21% 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. 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. 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.

Technology Stack

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

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.
• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget.
• $100/month education budget with more expensive items covered with manager approval.
• Top-tier health insurance for you and your dependents, with 100% of premiums covered by Ashby.

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.