Senior Engineering Manager, Ashby
€76-185k
0.02% – 0.16% equity • Offers Bonus. UK salary £91K – £200K • 0.03% – 0.16% equity
More information about location
All-in-one recruiting software
Open for applications
All-in-one recruiting software
101-200 employees
Open for applications
€76-185k
0.02% – 0.16% equity • Offers Bonus. UK salary £91K – £200K • 0.03% – 0.16% 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
- Engineering leadership comes in many flavors, not all of which fit our model. I thought I’d outline some things I’m looking for to help you decide if this fits what you’re looking for:
- You are technical and can hold in-depth conversations with direct reports from infra to backend to frontend
- You know what exceptional engineers look like. You’ve thought deeply about what makes them tick, how to recruit them, and how to grow folks into them. I want to see depth here, the industry often regurgitates a vanilla description, but the reality is more nuanced
- You hold your team to a high standard and don’t shy away from getting into the details and giving feedback, even to the best folks on your team
- You’re good at thinking about product, business, and maybe even design, but you’re not interested in calling the shots and are more interested in building a team that can make the best decisions without you
- You think engineering culture and process could use improvement, and you’ve tried or successfully implemented something that sheds the status quo in pursuit of something better
- You are an excellent and empathetic communicator. Facilitating change at both an individual and organization level requires understanding how to navigate the beliefs, opinions, and past experiences of engineers and figuring out how to both convince them of a new way of doing things while also leaving yourself open to feedback
- Put another way, you shouldn’t apply if:
- You don’t enjoy coding or don’t find time to stay up-to-date on technology
- You want to make all the product decisions instead of empowering your team to make those calls
- You're happy with a team of engineers that are predominantly early-career, mid-career, or don't thrive with ownership or autonomy. With enough guardrails, the team can get things done
- A staff or principal engineer to you is someone who spends most of their time project managing or doing architecture reviews
- You’re not optimistic or convinced that we can build a large engineering team that functions differently than the status quo. You think, at some size, common processes need to be implemented to ensure consistent product delivery (e.g., sprint planning, product managers writing in-depth specifications). You might not say it out loud, but you think, at some size, compromises have to be made for the sake of hiring numbers
What the job involves
- At Ashby. we’re building an environment that is optimistic about what engineers can own and achieve and embraces the innovative engineers (and frankly, often stays out of their way)
- Doing this requires a broader set of skills in individual engineers. Technical and product management skills blended with customer empathy and business context. Finding and growing people with such a broad set of skills is a challenge, it’s also deeply fulfilling
- To accomplish this, our engineering leaders need to think deeply about process, culture, and individual performance - not running sprint planning or driving product and technical decisions. You’ll focus on building your team, their skills to thrive with the ownership they’re given, and an environment that empowers them to do their best work consistently, with little distraction
- This role is heavily focused on growing engineers. For example, many managers view themselves as working to unblock engineers. We view that managers should be coaching engineers on how to unblock themselves
- We’ve already gathered an experienced, talented, and collaborative team of 25+ engineers. You’ll help me manage the growing team of engineers in Europe
- In addition to working with engineers you’ll also get to work on projects yourselves. Some examples of work our engineering leaders have done:
- Provide feedback on product and technical specs to help engineers identify where to cut scope or improve quality. You don’t make the final decisions, but you’ll influence and coach ICs to reach the right ones
- Grow engineers to the point where they can take large, loosely defined projects, and deliver them with little intervention. They still ask for help when needed - the difference is that they’re driving
- Rethink how we (and the industry) do pull request reviews by aligning on goals with the team, sampling a set of PRs to understand how effective they are, and writing a proposal to the team about what we could change to speed up reviews while giving reviewers the time and space to give useful feedback
- Design and improve interview tracks based on candidate and team feedback. We pride ourselves on having thoughtful interviews that simulate actually working with us!
- Jump into our systems and code to debug a customer issue, ship a small bug fix, or improve our developer experience. Engineering leaders at Ashby are great engineers and enjoy keeping their skills up-to-date (while staying off the critical path)
- Improve how we generate and simulate data in demo accounts. It’s a project off the critical path, but it helps you keep up-to-date on our codebase while immensely impacting the business, from Engineering to QA to Sales
- Our tech stack, with the caveat that we don’t require previous experience: TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, Redis
Application process
- Intro Call (30m) - Discuss your application questions, align on the responsibilities of the role, and answer questions about Ashby
- Past Experience Deep Dive (1h) - Discuss your past experience as an engineering leader
- Technical Screen (1h) - Add a feature back to Ashby. You'll spend most of your time understanding a specific part of our codebase and write less than 15 lines of code
- Coffee Chat with VP of Engineering (1h) - Spend time with our VP of Engineering and get to know each other
- Writing Take Home (2h + 30m meeting) - Understand how you think about organizational problems, approach solutions, and communicate
- Meet the Team (2h) - At this point, the engineering leadership team is excited about you and you'll meet our CEO, Engineers, Product Managers, and some other folks on the team
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
Insights
Many candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
32% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Jun 2024
$30m
SERIES C
Sep 2022
$21.5m
SERIES B
Total funding: $64.5m
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 values
- Apply Principled Thinking Over Experience
- Reflect On And Optimize How You And Your Team Use Your Time
- Apply Thoughtful Communication
- Prioritize Ownership
- Be Frustratingly Patient About Hiring
- Optimize For The Long Term, But, Move With Urgency
- Aim High
- Push For Continuous Improvement
- Care Deeply About Our Customers
- Foster Constructive Debate And Feedback
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Articles
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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