Staff Platform Engineer - UK

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.

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, over 2500 customers, very low churn, and many years of runway.

About the role and how we work:

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.

For instance, you could work on:

• Optimise 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.

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 care 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.
• You’re a Swiss army knife. 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.
• 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. Recruiting teams were leveling up how they did their work, but instead of software meeting this new standard, it held them back.

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!).

Minimal Process & Lots of Ownership:

At Ashby, we want to build an environment that encourages every engineer to be their best. So, at Ashby, every Engineer runs their project.

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.

Put Effort into Diversity:

Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Today, 25% of engineers and 50% of our engineering leaders at Ashby are from underrepresented groups.

Interview Process:

Our interview process is three rounds:

• Introduction call with Hiring Manager (15 to 30m, live)
• A technical screen where we pair in our actual codebase (1h, live)
• Three non-coding interviews that focus on technical design, debugging incidents, and infrastructure (3h 15m, live can be split across multiple days)

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.

Benefits:

• Competitive salary and equity.
• 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.

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.