Product Engineer

About Ashby

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.

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).

What You'll Do

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

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

Benefits

• $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval
• Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year
• Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave
• 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