Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Ashby
Americas
$200-260k
Salary in Canada: $205,000–$335,000CAD + 0.05%–0.5% Plus equity
More information about location
All-in-one recruiting software
Job no longer available
All-in-one recruiting software
201-500 employees
Job no longer available
$200-260k
Salary in Canada: $205,000–$335,000CAD + 0.05%–0.5% Plus equity
More information about location
201-500 employees
Company mission
To redefine the applicant tracking system (ATS) category, providing talent teams with analytics, workflows and automation.
Role
Who you are
- We’re looking for someone who can build systems that an engineer would like to work with: mature and boring but open-minded and approachabl
- We have to balance reliability with flexibility. Software and its availability are now mission critical to almost every working professional
- To be in an SRE in today’s world, you have to be extremely comfortable evaluating risk, those you take and those others take
- 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 be the third SRE, so 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
What the job involves
- As an SRE at Ashby, you’ll do that and more. Every Product Engineer owns their projects and ships with minimal oversight
- We, as SREs, approach this from a practical view. We don’t put roadblocks to ensure security when common sense will do and we don’t build processes like change management boards around the lowest common denominator
- But with great power comes great responsibility: we handle personal and confidential data about some of the biggest decisions we ever make at work
- As we grow, more and bigger customers rely on us to be reliable and secure and how we operate internally will need to evolve
- Optimize 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
- 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
Application 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
- 30-minute introduction call
- A technical screen (60-minute in-person)
- A virtual on-site of 2 hours and 45 minutes (can be split across two days)
- Our VP of Engineering, Abhik will be your main point of contact and prep you for interviews. You’ll meet your manager, 4 to 6 people in engineering (with 15 minutes in each interview to ask them questions) including our entire current SRE team. If we don’t give an offer, we’ll provide feedback!
Our take
Reportedly, 50% of employers don’t use applicant tracking systems, largely because of blockers with implementation or insufficient buy-in from top management. Ashby's co-founder and CEO, Benji Encz, experienced first-hand how existing solutions failed to support hyper-growth hiring needs whilst working at PlanGrid, which is in part what led to the creation of the company.
Ashby is looking to redefine the ATS category - providing talent teams with analytics, workflows and automation - and intends to replace solutions from well-established vendors like Greenhouse and Lever with algorithms. The company's AI can schedule interviews and infer demographic data, which clients use for aggregate analyses of DEI hiring metrics.
The market for recruitment software could potentially reach $3.5 billion by 2030. Unsurprisingly, there is now a growing number of startups emerging to compete for a slice of it. Despite the crowded market and having only emerged from stealth in 2022, Ashby has already secured over 500 clients (including high-profile customers like Notion and Figma). The company has also attracted impressive funding, which will be used to expand its product offering beyond what is typically expected from an ATS and grow its customer success and community initiatives.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
32% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Jul 2025
$50m
SERIES D
Jun 2024
$30m
SERIES C
Total funding: $114.7m
Company benefits
- Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year
- 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
- Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget
- $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval
- Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave 🇺🇸
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Benjamin Encz
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously the Director of Engineering and Part-Time Recruitment Operations at PlanGrid. They also worked as a Software Engineer at Make School and was a Lecturer at Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University (DHBW).
Abhik Pramanik
(Co-Founder & VP of Engineering)VP of Engineer at Ashby. Previously a Senior Product Manager at Lob and a Senior Product Manager at PlanGrid.
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