Ashby - Staff Platform Engineer, Canada

• L4 (Staff): Toronto & VancouverCA$188K – CA$230K • Offers Equity • L4 (Staff): Canada - All Other LocationsCA$173K – CA$212K • Offers Equity • L5 (Sr Staff): Toronto & VancouverCA$267K – CA$326K • Offers Equity • L5 (Sr Staff): Canada - All Other LocationsCA$220K – CA$268K • Offers Equity • Please read Engineering Levels and Compensation to learn how we level Engineers and approach compensation across different locations. • 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’ll search every rock, inventory every clue, hunt every mismatch. We do that, too - together we’ll be armed with state-of-the-art monitoring tools and an impressive amount of data, and join you in the adventure. • You don’t take shortcuts. You’re speaking up for the future user, the edge case, the doomsday design. You know product engineers want to build it with you, and see them as allies, where you give them the power and knowledge to access greater things. • 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’ll be on interview panels choosing your next colleagues, and you’ll take that seriously. You only want to work with people who make you better, and want to make you better. • You’ve built infrastructure at a slightly later stage than Ashby is at - you know how to deal with millions of data points, have seen great (or not great) infrastructure make or break customer experience, and have automated everything from provisioning to monitoring and release process. • You’re a Swiss army knife (all nationalities welcome ;) ). You’ll get every hard problem the company faces. You’ll get to do infrastructure updates, security enforcements, database optimization, Kubernetes debugging, and digging through Typescript traces figuring out what doesn’t work. You probably don’t feel like an expert at at least some of that... and that appeals to you. • 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, and expect a lead or manager to make the final call on what that is. Our leads (and managers) give ample commentary and feedback on technical decisions and how they’re made, but you ship what you want to build and are accountable for it. • You hate SQL. We have a lot of features built around making the best out of data, and our platform engineers also sometimes dive into a gnarly report or advise engineers on a more performant data model to use. • You don’t want to code. Our SREs are some of our best software engineers and they are just as responsible for the application as the other engineering teams - albeit at a platform level. Reviewing code and submitting code changes will be part of your day to day. • Your primary mode of communicating best practices to engineers is live meetings. We’re a very async culture and written communication (and code) is how changes get made. As an Ashby SRE, you will need to share new tooling and best practices with engineers faster than your next meeting opportunity will take you. • You’ve never delivered a project, on your own, without someone prodding you for updates. We have no project or delivery managers to fill your calendar with busy work, but the flip side is you have to do your project management, seek the help you need to get unstuck and cut scope when it’s worthwhile. • 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. • We use Datadog and Sentry on 100% cloud-based (AWS) infra. We take developer experience and reliability seriously: all engineers are on call in a follow-the-sun model, and everyone contributes to developer tooling. • 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. • better • 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. They must do this while considering the interview load on each individual and whether interviewers need to be trained and shadowing others. 🥵 TA software didn’t help. • 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. We want other functions and departments to be jealous of what TA teams can do with Ashby, and today they often are! • 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!). We do it through: • 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 • Minimal Process & Lots of Ownership • 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. While they did this with minimal oversight, stakeholders were never in the dark as to what was going on, and no setback was a surprise. • Traditional product-development processes aren’t meant for the best engineers. Their purpose is to create consistent outcomes regardless of the engineer’s skill. But, consistency comes at the expense of an engineer’s time and freedom—both ingredients necessary to generate those magical outcomes. As a result, process stifles the best engineers and doesn’t give others the opportunity to practice the behaviors that made the best engineers the “best.” • 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. Engineers take on the rest: they research the problem, write product specs, build wireframes, and implement their solution end-to-end. We rely on engineers, not process, to push information outward to the relevant folks (e.g., Product Managers) and pull folks in to help (e.g., Designers, Infra). It’s a new level of ownership for many engineers, but we’d rather an engineer fail a bit and coach up their skills than use process as a crutch. Not everyone succeeds in our culture, but those who do thrive. • Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate • Our engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind (meet them here!). These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally. 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 are in <2h meetings per week (Abhik wrote about it here). • To drive it home, here's a recent calendar of an engineer who has been with us for over 4 years: • We also meet in person at least twice a year, once as a department and once as a company. You also have a small budget to meet up with folks in your city/region. • 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 15x a day. A debugger that works out of the box. Everyone on the team has contributed to our developer experience 💪🏾. • Great developer tooling. • 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) that we constantly improve. Each improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app (short video below). • Building blocks to create powerful and customizable products fast. • Here’s an impromptu quote from Arjun in our company Slack of what it’s like to build a feature at Ashby: • And a demo of one of these building blocks: • 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, 21% 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. • 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, and we will encourage you to take it. • A minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, covered by Ashby. For folks outside the US, it may be longer to be in line with regional requirements. • 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, we offer top-tier health insurance for you and your dependents, with 100% of premiums covered by Ashby. In other countries, we provide high-quality supplemental health insurance for you and your dependents, also fully 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.