We’re looking for a talented backend engineer who wants to drive the future of Ashby’s API and Integrations Platform. Our product serves as a system of record for our customers. Ashby’s API is a foundation for other companies and entrepreneurs to build successful products and businesses. You will play a crucial role in improving our API’s flexibility, ease of use, and security to rival the quality of gold-standard APIs like Figma’s and Stripe’s. You’ll also build abstractions to help us quickly build integrations with other core systems like Google Workspace and Workday. These responsibilities require creativity, empathy, and serious architectural skill, so prepare for a challenge.
I’m Abhik, Ashby’s Co-Founder and VP of Engineering. I’ve led API teams at several companies and seen firsthand that the quality of a product’s API and integrations significantly impacts its business. In fact, at a previous company, I estimated that we lost 25% of potential customers because we didn’t have the integrations to connect our product to the rest of a customer’s technology stack. I lobbied leadership to create an API and integrations team and became its Product Manager. The engineer in me took pride in how our API was designed, the quality of our documentation, and being responsive to developer feedback. It resulted in a rich partner ecosystem that won us a lot of business and continues to flourish today.
At Ashby, we’re taking the same approach and have thought deeply about our API from day one. As a result, the industry noticed. In just two years since our public launch, we’ve added over 100 integrations, and our partners love our API so much that they develop features for Ashby ahead of competitors.
We’re bringing you in to continue expanding our API's functionality and versatility. For instance, other engineers on this team have:
- Created a generic assessment API that’s empowered a variety of integrations (from background checks to coding tests to English tests) while creating a rich experience inside our product so our customers don’t have to hop between products in their day-to-day work.
- Designed systems that seamlessly move our customers’ data from competitors to Ashby in days (vs. industry standard of several months), allow them to use both systems simultaneously, and transition in-flight hiring processes so there is zero downtime switching.
- Built our Microsoft 365 integration in a few months to unlock business in Europe and non-tech industries. Part of this also required refactoring our Google Workspace integration so that both integrations reuse the same business logic for common tasks.
- Built an API and API docs that provide comprehensive data and runnable examples directly on the doc site. Partners rave about it and recommend it to others!
Why You Should or Shouldn’t Apply
You should apply if:
- Happy developers and customers are your happy place. You care deeply about their experience with the software you build and seek to understand them to empower a great experience.
- You care about the small things. A mismatched data model, wrong customer configuration, or oddly documented partner API is all that stands between you and complete chaos, and you fear none of it.
- You’ve tackled projects with a lot of product and technical ambiguity, and the intersection of the two is where you thrive.
- 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.
- You’re not afraid to tackle any part of a technology stack. While this role is primarily backend, you do what’s necessary to successfully deliver a feature.
- You seek to create leverage in your work.
You should not apply if:
- You like projects to take months to years.
- You need a company-driven process and structure to get your projects across the finish line.
- You can get lost in the details.
- You haven’t led or taken ownership of projects before.
- A tech lead, staff, or principal engineer, to you, is someone who spends most of their time project managing or doing architecture reviews.
What We’re Building
Talent teams aspire to build a hiring process that identifies great candidates, moves them quickly through the interview process, and provides an excellent experience for the candidate. To accomplish this, recruiters perform thousands of daily tasks to coordinate and relay information between candidates, interviewers, and hiring managers. Teams struggle to keep up!
Scheduling a final round is an excellent example of our customers' challenges. A recruiter needs to collect availability from the candidate, identify potential interviewers, perform “Calendar Tetris” to find who is available to interview the candidate, schedule on the earliest date possible, and perform any last-minute adjustments as availability changes.
Ashby provides talent teams with 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 put a lot of effort into designing products that are approachable to beginners but mastered and extended by power users.
We have many customers, great revenue growth, years of runway, and amazing investors like YCombinator, Elad Gil, and Lachy Groom. I’ll share more once we meet.
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 consists of lifelong learners who are humble and kind. 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.
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 10x a day.
- 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:
Give Engineers Ownership & Agency
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.
Put Effort into Diversity
Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Today, 26% 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. Our interview process is three rounds:
- 30-minute introduction call
- A technical screen (take home or 75-minute in-person)
- A virtual on-site of 4 hours and 15 minutes (can be split across two days)
Your hiring manager will be your main point of contact and prep you for interviews. 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.
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.
- Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year.
- Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US.
- Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget.
- $100/month education budget.
- If you’re in the US, top-notch health insurance for you and your dependents.
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.
Compensation Range: $160K - $230K
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