Staff Software Engineer, Ashby
Product Engineering, UK
£138-224k
+ Equity
Senior and Expert level
Remote from UK
All-in-one recruiting software
Open for applications
All-in-one recruiting software
201-500 employees
B2BRecruitmentAnalyticsSaaSAutomation
Open for applications
£138-224k
+ Equity
Senior and Expert level
Remote from UK
201-500 employees
B2BRecruitmentAnalyticsSaaSAutomation
Company mission
To redefine the applicant tracking system (ATS) category, providing talent teams with analytics, workflows and automation.
Role
Who you are
- 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), React, GraphQL API, Node.js, Postgres, Redis
- When they joined Ashby, many of our engineers switched from other languages like Swift and Kotlin (Ben), platforms like iOS (Tom) and Windows (Sergey). We care more about fundamentals (e.g., debugging, abstractions) and how fast you learn. For folks on the team who switched, it's nice seeing changes hot reload versus waiting for XCode to compile
- Software engineers come in many flavors, not all of which fit our model. Here are some things to help you decide if this fits you and what you’re looking for:
- You’re not afraid to tackle any part of a technology stack. You do what’s necessary to successfully deliver a feature, whether writing frontend or choosing new infrastructure. We’ll provide a supportive environment to do it successfully (e.g., design system, SRE team)
- You’ve tackled projects with a lot of product and technical ambiguity, and you thrive at the intersection of the two. We’re not building a simple CRUD app, and many of the challenges we tackle require you to use your knowledge of our customers to build powerful abstractions and flexibility in the system to solve a class of problems
- You know how to strike the right balance between speed and quality. Ashby wasn’t built quickly. We took four years to launch publicly because convincing customers to switch required a high-quality product. However, time isn’t infinite, especially for a startup, so we still move with urgency—we’ve built the equivalent of three or more VC-backed startups with a very small team
- 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. To thrive (and level up), you’ll need to be open to feedback (and we give lots of it)
- You’re an excellent collaborator and communicator. Ownership and freedom don’t mean you work in a vacuum. You’ll need to vet your decisions with the appropriate stakeholders, keep them up to date when necessary, and work with other engineers to get your projects across the finish line. Clear and concise communication helps a lot here!
- You seek to create leverage in your work. The nature of software is that you can often automate or abstract what would be tedious, time-consuming work. Your impatience usually leads to new abstractions, tools to allow Support to debug before Engineering, new lint rules to prevent common bugs, etc
What the job involves
- You’ve probably seen this role posted before, and it’s because we’re always expanding the team (we’re on track to double this year). We’re bubbling with ideas on how to support Talent Acquisition through software, and we’ve started the journey of building products beyond Talent Acquisition. We read every application and aim to respond to yours within 3-4 days (often sooner)
- At Ashby, we’re building an environment that is optimistic about what engineers can own and achieve
- An environment that embraces innovative engineers, and, frankly, often stays out of their way
- 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 research competitors, write product specs, make wireframes, and more
- To ground it with examples, product engineers at Ashby have:
- Designed and built automated interview scheduling
- This feature automates scheduling by calculating possible times from a pool of interviewers and other constraints, and then presenting these times to the candidate for selection via our responsive web app
- This solves the “Calendar Tetris” problem I talk about in "What We're Building
- Built a generalized declarative 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
- Specced, designed, and implemented a feature that allows users to complete 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
- 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
- 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!
- 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!)
- 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
- 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
- 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 (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 15x a day
- A debugger that works out of the box
- Everyone on the team has contributed to our 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) that we constantly improve
- Each improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app (short video below)
- We want an exceptional onboarding experience for every new hire. At Ashby, your dev environment is set up with a single script, you push your first product change on day one, and you spend the rest of your time shipping product changes that give you a tour of our codebase and best practices
- The product changes increase in scope and ambiguity from simple copy changes to the delivery of a prominent, impactful feature. Your manager will do a 30, 60, and 90-day review to give feedback and calibrate on how we work together
- It’s a team effort to get you successfully onboarded; you’ll have a peer paired with you to answer questions, pair program, and check in often to see if you need help. The rest of the team will run training sessions on our culture, product, engineering process, and technical architecture
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 product and tech specs collaboratively, and talking through decisions. There are no leetcode or whiteboard exercises
- Our interview process is three rounds:
- Introduction call with Hiring Manager (15 to 30m, live)
- A technical screen where we pair in our actual codebase (1h, live)
- Three non-coding interviews that focus on product thinking, technical design, and infrastructure (3h 15m, live can be split across multiple days)
- Depending on our leadership team’s bandwidth, we may start with an additional 30m screen with a recruiter
- Your hiring manager will be your main point of contact and prep you for interviews. Each round will have written guidance so you know what to expect (you’ll need minimal preparation). You’ll meet 4 to 6 people in engineering (with 5-15 minutes in each interview to ask them questions). 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
Top investors
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
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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