Platform Engineer

Position

Staff Platform Engineer, Canada

Company Overview

Ashby builds software that lets talent teams build an efficient, delightful, respectful hiring process. We have notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. Our growth and retention metrics are best‑in‑class among our peers: we have tens of millions in ARR, growing >100% year over year, over 2,500 customers, very low churn, and many years of runway.

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.

About the Role and How We Work

Hi 👋 I’m Colin, Head of EMEA Engineering. I’ve spent a number of years leading engineering teams in startups, and that has always included being close to infrastructure teams – no matter what name they’ve worn (SRE, infrastructure, platform, etc). I’ve got my hands dirty building the initial infrastructure for startups and know the value a talented infrastructure engineer brings. The rigour, the discipline, the peace and quiet when everything just hums along.

Our infrastructure is in a good place for now. Nothing is static. Ashby continues to grow rapidly, putting strain on our existing infrastructure. We’re always looking to give our customers more powerful hiring software, and building new product features often requires new pieces of infrastructure.

Having herded plenty of snowflake servers in the past, I’ve learned there’s a better way. I (and Ashby) place a lot of value on code‑as‑infrastructure. 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. 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

What We’re Looking For

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