Engineering Manager - North America Time Zones

Hi 👋🏻 I’m Blaine, Director of Engineering at Ashby. In my career as both a software engineer and leader, I’ve found that I work best (and have the most fun!) when I have a deep understanding of the customer, ownership over designing solutions, and a talented team of colleagues. I joined Ashby because I saw an engineering team that was intentionally built from the ground up using these two principles as starting points. We have ambitious plans for the next year, and I’m looking for managers to help us mentor and grow our North America engineering team.

Engineering leaders come in many shapes and are often asked to fill many roles to adapt to the needs of their team(s). At Ashby, we’re specifically looking for engineering leaders who:

• Care deeply about delivering quality products to customers, but look to celebrate and facilitate the wins of their team more than making product decisions themselves.

• Are most happy when they can hire and grow teams of talented engineers that they can then trust to make both product and engineering decisions.

• Value teams built on psychological safety, diversity, the ability to take risks, and honest but kind feedback. Engineers should feel supported by not only their manager but also by their peers.

• Experience in DevOps tooling or leading DevOps teams is a big plus!

In your first three months, you can expect to:

• Take over day-to-day management of a talented and experienced team of engineers focused on a few domain areas.

• Play an active role in recruiting and hiring engineers to grow your team.

• Work alongside your team to help ensure they are making the right product and technical investments and are applying their talents in places of maximum leverage to ensure the product and team stays healthy and successful.

One formality: we do require at least 2 years of experience as a full-time software engineer and 1.5 years of experience as an engineering people manager for this role.

What We’re Building

At Ashby, we’re 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 and 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.

Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture is motivated by Abhik and Benji’s (our co-founders) 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 (Abhik wrote about it here). Even managers can rely on getting consistent time (and support to make, if necessary) to focus and do creative work without the demand of constant meetings.

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: 

“Working on a generic framework for Surveys is really paying off! I was able to add the Automation Rules feature to EEOC Forms really quickly because I had some generic components and backend code. Took about 10 minutes and ~50 lines of code to do!”

Give Engineers Ownership & Autonomy

We, as engineers, find clever ways to solve problems, which amplifies when we deeply understand the problem. All of us in technical leadership 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, as a manager at Ashby, you’ll provide mentorship and feedback to engineers to ensure they are successful when delivering projects.

Put Effort into Diversity 

Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. I’ve seen first-hand that building teams that are inclusive and psychologically safe for everyone is not only the right thing to do, but creates an environment where everyone can find more joy in their work knowing they and their colleagues can bring their full selves to work every day. I believe in building diversity into the DNA of organizational culture methodically and intentionally to ensure that we are creating 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 a process-creation exercise, write tech specs collaboratively, and talk through decisions. Our interview process is four rounds: 

1. 30-minute introduction call

2. A technical screen

3. A deep dive on people leadership and mentorship

4. 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 can get a product demo as early as the introductory call. During the interview process, you’ll meet both co-founders 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!

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.

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.