Product Engineer

Hi 👋🏾 I’m Abhik, the Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at Ashby. I’m excited to open this position because it has many responsibilities I want as an engineer. 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, for example, research competitors, write product specs, and implement features from frontend to backend. To ground it with examples, product engineers at Ashby have:

• Designed and built automated candidate scheduling. This feature automates scheduling by calculating possible times from a pool of interviewers and presenting these times to the candidate for selection via our responsive web app.

• Built a generalized filter architecture that allows users to create complex filters for any record with a consistent UI and compile it to SQL in our backend. Many user-facing features use it.

• Spec-ed, designed, and implemented a feature that allows users to complete the process of signing offers entirely within Ashby. This project involved talking to customers to understand their requirements, deciding what technologies to use, building a prototype, and working with other team members to integrate the final implementation into additional features.

These projects reflect what we’re accomplishing at Ashby: improving the productivity of working professionals (starting with talent teams) with intelligent and powerful software. We put a lot of effort into designing products that are approachable to beginners but mastered & extended by power users. In many ways, spreadsheets set the bar here.

We haven’t launched publicly, but we have many paying customers who love us, and we have great investors like YCombinator, Elad Gil, and Lachy Groom. I’ll share more once we meet.

One formality, we do require at least 1.5 years of experience as a full-time software engineer for this role.

 

Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture is motivated by Benji’s (my co-founder and CEO) and my 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

Our engineering team (and the team at large) consists of lifelong learners who are humble and kind (meet them here!). These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally (we filter for it in interviews). 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 (I wrote about it here). 

 

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. We’ve done this through investment in:

• Great developer tooling. Our CI/CD takes ~10m, and we deploy at least 5x a day. Everyone on the team has contributed to developer experience 💪🏾

• Building blocks to create powerful and customizable products fast. At the core of Ashby is a set of common components (analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) which we are constantly improving. Each improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app (short video on it here).

Here’s an impromptu quote from Arjun in our company Slack of what it’s like to build a feature at Ashby:

 

 

Give Engineers Ownership & Autonomy

We, as engineers, find clever ways to solve problems, which amplifies when we deeply understand the problem. Benji and I did our best work as engineers when we had a deep understanding of the end-user and the business and ownership over the solution. Our engineering culture reflects this experience: engineers own projects end-to-end, from speaking with users to writing product specs to UX design. These are skills that we often don’t get to practice as engineers, and, at Ashby, we provide mentorship to grow them and help from the team where you want it.

 

Put Effort into Diversity 

Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Having seen my mother and partner build their careers as minority women in non-diverse fields, I want to make sure Ashby creates opportunities for the next generation of engineers from underrepresented groups.

Today, 26% of engineers at Ashby are from underrepresented groups. It’s not great, and we are taking conscious steps to improve, like sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, no leetcode interviews, and more.

 

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 tech specs collaboratively, and talking through decisions (no leetcode or whiteboard exercises). Our interview process is three rounds: 

1. 30-minute introduction call (we demo Ashby!)

2. A technical screen (take home or 75-minute in-person)

3. A virtual on-site of 3 hours and 30 minutes (can be split across two days) 

Your hiring manager will be your main point of contact and prep you for interviews. You’ll meet my co-founder and CEO plus 4 to 6 people in engineering (with 15 minutes in each interview to ask them questions). If we don’t give an offer, we’ll provide feedback!

 

Your First Two Months at Ashby

We want an exceptional onboarding experience for every new hire. At Ashby, your dev environment sets up with a single script, you push your first change on day one, and we spend the rest of the time building your confidence in our codebase and practices culminating in the delivery of a prominent, impactful feature. We’ll pair you with a peer who’ll guide you through your first tasks and be someone you rely on, from answering questions to pair programming.

 

Technology Stack

I’m sharing our tech stack with the caveat that we don’t require previous experience in it (but a love of typed languages is helpful 😀): TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, Redis.

 

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.

• 10-year exercise window for stock options. You shouldn’t feel pressure to purchase stock options if you leave Ashby —do it when you feel financially comfortable.

• Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year. Expect “Vacation?” in our one-on-one agenda until you start taking it 😅.

• Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US. We plan to expand this to employees in other countries as situations arise.

• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. Get what you need to be happy and productive!

• $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.

• If you’re in the US, top-notch health insurance for you and your dependents with all premiums covered by us.

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.