Head of Engineering, AMER

Head of Engineering In The Americas

Hi, I'm Abhik, Ashby's Co-Founder and VP of Engineering. We're looking for an Engineering leader who has done it all : You've built impressive products as an individual contributor, you've built a bench of amazing Engineers, and you've established the cultural norms and processes of an entire Engineering department. Ashby's success and ambition mean we're doubling the Engineering team in the next year, and we need your experience and leadership to do it thoughtfully.

Our product and growth are exceptional. Ashby All-in-One is powerful, easy to use, and replaces several venture-backed companies' worth of products (often with a better experience). 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, very low churn, and many years of runway.

A big part of our secret sauce is how we run Engineering. We achieve incredible speed and quality by discarding many industry norms and being optimistic about Engineers. We consider what makes exceptional Engineers exceptional and then figure out how to hire them and build an environment that gives them the freedom and agency to actually be exceptional.

In other words, if engineers writing product specs, making product decisions, and not breaking down projects into individual tickets excites you, you've found the right place.

As Head of Engineering in the Americas, you'll work closely with me and your counterpart in EMEA, Colin, to continue scaling our unique culture. You'll manage our remote team of 20 engineers and 2 EMs, who cover a wide variety of specializations, from Product Engineers to Site Reliability Engineers to Design Engineers. Over the next year, you'll grow that team to 40 engineers and 5-6 EMs.

I'll share more details once we meet.

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!

Why You Shouldn't Apply

• You've always been a line manager or middle manager. You haven't led the definition and evolution of the culture and processes of an entire Engineering department.
• You've never managed managers. Managing other leaders is a very different ball game, and not everyone enjoys it or thrives in it the seniority of this role won't let you explore that.
• You don't enjoy coding or don't find time to stay up-to-date on technology. We believe great leaders are folks who were great engineers themselves. That starts with loving the craft and never giving it up.
• You went into management because it was the only growth path available. We want folks who could have been Principal engineers (or were one!).
• You're happy with a team of engineers who are predominantly early-career or mid-career or don't thrive with ownership or autonomy. You believe that with enough guardrails, the team can get things done.
• To you, a Staff or Principal Engineer is someone who spends most of their time project managing or conducting architecture reviews. You don't believe staff and principal engineers could lead by the example they set or the leverage they create through their work.
• You're not optimistic or convinced that we can build a large engineering team that functions differently from 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 or consistency.

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 :

You'll be a critical part of figuring out how to scale these methods from 50 engineers to 100 and beyond.

Minimal Process & Lots of Ownership

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 freedomboth 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.

Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate

Our engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind. 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

To drive it home, here's a recent calendar of an engineer who has been with us for over 4 years :

We also meet in person at least twice a year, once as a department and once as a company. You also have a small budget to meet up with folks in your city / region.

Increase Leverage, not Team Size

We built Ashby with the quality, breadth, and depth that many customers would expect from much larger teams over larger time scales. We've done this through investment in :

Put Effort into Diversity

Diverse teams