Head of Engineering, Americas

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 IC, 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.

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 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

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

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.

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

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 :

Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Having seen my mother and partner build their careers as minority women in non-diverse fields, I want to make sure Ashby creates opportunities for the next generation of engineers from underrepresented groups.

Today, 21% of engineers at Ashby are from underrepresented groups. It's not great, and we are taking conscious steps to improve, like sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, no leetcode interviews, and more.

This is an important role that will lead half of our Engineering team now and for the foreseeable future. The interview process reflects that both in challenge and length (~6.5h) :

Depending on my bandwidth, we may start with an additional 30m screen with a recruiter. Near the end of the process, we'll do reference checks.

This is also an important decision for you, so I'm always happy to have coffee chats in person or over Zoom to get to know each other.

Your first three months at Ashby will be spent learning about Ashby Engineering and easing into leadership. While most of your onboarding will be driven by a 6-month plan you put together (and refine over time), you'll also ship some product changes and features. What better way to learn how ICs work than to be one! Don't worry if you don't know our technologies. The team is really helpful and our dev environment is pretty awesome : it sets up in a single script and you'll be able to push your first product change on day one.

You and I will do 30-day, 60-day, 90-day, and 6-month reviews to calibrate on our unique culture and how you, I, and the team will work together.

Benefits :