Staff Software Engineer, Ashby
Product Engineering, EU
€141-226k
+ Equity
All-in-one recruiting software
Open for applications
All-in-one recruiting software
201-500 employees
Open for applications
€141-226k
+ Equity
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
- 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
- Our engineering culture strives to recreate the environments where we did our best work as ICs – where we had the ownership and agency to impact our users with creative and innovative software
- 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
- 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
- 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!
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
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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