Head of Platform & Infrastructure Engineering

Hi 👋🏾, I’m Abhik, Ashby’s Co-Founder and CTO. Ashby is growing fast, which means exponential growth across every product metric: jobs, applications, interviews, you name it. We’re not slowing down, and as a result, keeping Ashby performant and reliable is a company priority. We need your leadership to do that now and in the future.

We’ve already assembled a fantastic Platform & Infrastructure team of 11 engineers (all Senior+, >70% Staff), and they’ve done an excellent job handling our growth, but the management and leadership of Platform & Infrastructure have been diffused across our Engineering leaders. As we hit our next level of scale, it’s time for us to hire an Engineering leader responsible for performance and reliability, and for building out the team that ensures those. Hopefully, that’s you!

The Role

In this role, you will report directly to me, and your responsibilities will include:

• Building and maintaining a long-term vision and 6-month roadmap for Platform & Infrastructure.

• Growing the Platform & Infrastructure team. You’ll hire ICs, managers, and build out a headcount plan. This will include determining if more specialized roles need to be established (e.g., DB Admin).

• Building and maintaining an excellent relationship with Product Engineering. The ideal state is that Product Engineering can move incredibly fast independently without breaking performance or reliability, and Platform & Infrastructure doesn’t feel like they’re always cleaning up someone else’s “mess.” Today, there’s a great relationship, but there’s always room for improvement!

• Assessing and improving our monitoring and incident management process. Again, we’re doing relatively well here, but there’s always room to improve. For example, making uptime measurement easier and improving coordination with Support during incidents.

• Maintaining vendor relationships and negotiating pricing for our critical hosting and observability infrastructure, including AWS, ClickHouse, Datadog, and Braintrust. They have a meaningful impact on gross margin and need to be kept in check.

• You’ve managed managers. Managing other leaders is a very different ball game, and not everyone enjoys it or thrives in it. Within your first 6 months, you’ll most likely have to hire a manager underneath you.

• If you have experience managing developer experience and developer tools, building out a dedicated team for DevEx. If you don’t have experience here, DevEx will report into Product Engineering. Happy to discuss once we meet!

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, then figure out how to hire them and build an environment that gives them the freedom and agency to be exceptional. You’ll be a key leader in ensuring that continues!

The Qualifications

We’re entrusting you with a company priority, so we want you to know how to scale products and build the great teams that do that. This means:

• You played an important role leading a company through a high-growth period (either as an IC Lead or Engineering Leader). You had to make high-quality decisions under pressure. That often meant striking a balance between short-term fixes to keep the product from falling over and long-term investments to ensure it didn’t happen again.

• You have experience hiring and building hiring processes, and enjoy it! You’ve designed interviews, interview loops, and led hiring strategy.

• You have a track record of excellent collaboration with other departments. You were a key contributor to company-level initiatives that involved Product Engineering, Product, Sales, or Support. Those departments felt heard and supported, yet positively challenged by you.

• You are knowledgeable about platform and infrastructure technologies, networking, and hardware. You know how Kubernetes goes beyond a Container Orchestration Platform, how traffic flows between Load Balancers and Pods, and how the intricacies of the underlying hardware can cause Cloud abstractions to break, etc.

• You are a great communicator, particularly in writing. You’ll need to be able to go deep with Infrastructure Engineers in conversations while also communicating those concepts to folks like myself who have much less experience.

You should be comfortable managing a team spanning from the Americas West Coast to Europe. You’ll be able to hire managers to focus on specific time zones, but I expect you to have skips with some engineers (and you should want to, too!). To ensure a reasonable work schedule, we’re only hiring candidates who live in the PST-GMT time zone.

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 never led a department within Engineering. You haven’t led the definition and evolution of culture and processes.

• 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 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 (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, including LLM-driven dev tooling.

• Putting effort into building a diverse team

Minimal Process & Lots of Ownership

The best engineers we’ve worked with delivered reliably magical outcomes. They often discovered problems, prioritized the right ones, 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 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, 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 (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 <2h meetings per week (I wrote about it here).

To drive it home, here's a recent calendar of an engineer who has been with us for over 4 years. ~34 hours of focus time, 2.5h of interviews, and 3.5 hours of meetings: