Staff Platform Engineer, Ashby
U.K.
£138-224k
+ Equity
More information about location
All-in-one recruiting software
Be an early applicant
All-in-one recruiting software
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
£138-224k
+ Equity
More information about location
101-200 employees
Company mission
To redefine the applicant tracking system (ATS) category, providing talent teams with analytics, workflows and automation.
Role
Who you are
- You’re an engineer who wants to build a “paved road” that excellent engineering teams can safely take to the moon and back
- We’re looking for someone who can build systems that an engineer would like to work with: mature and boring but open-minded and approachable
- 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 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
- We’re looking for a curious, rigorous, problem-hungry platform engineer (who codes!) to carry the ball as we bring Ashby to the big leagues
- We’ve listed this role twice: as a Platform Engineer and Site Reliability Engineer – our team does both, and we are open to candidates who lean towards one or the other
- As a Platform Engineer at Ashby, you’ll get to dive into scaling problems, add new capabilities to our platform, and think about how our entire team interacts with infrastructure
- All our own engineers own their projects end-to-end and ship with minimal oversight
- 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
- We’re at an inflection point where our ability to scale and deliver a seamless experience has a make-or-break impact – we have some of the fastest growing companies using our platform every day to hire hundreds of people per month
- We need someone like you to make good decisions, debug thorny issues, and build us a future-proof platform that can withstand this scale
- Our small but mighty infrastructure team has set up a secure and simple environment (we don’t believe in spinning up a new service unless necessary!) for our growing product team to build in
- That’s where you come in: you, too, will own projects end-to-end and have an impact on core parts of the Ashby developer and user experience
- For instance, you could work on:
- 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
- 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
Application process
- 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 technical design, debugging incidents, 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.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Jul 2025
$50m
SERIES D
Jun 2024
$30m
SERIES C
Total funding: $114.5m
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 Engineer at Ashby. Previously a Senior Product Manager at Lob and a Senior Product Manager at PlanGrid.
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