Principal Site Reliability Engineer - Americas in San Francisco

Job Description

We’re looking for a curious, rigorous, problem‑hungry platform engineer (who codes!) to carry the ball as we bring Ashby to the big leagues. 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 2500 customers, very low churn, and many years of runway. We’ll share more details once we meet, but you now probably have a good idea as to why we’re hiring for this role. 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 toward one or the other.

About the team

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.

Responsibilities

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

Other Focus Areas

We are looking for someone who can build systems that engineers 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 almost every working professional. To be an SRE in today’s world, you have to be extremely comfortable evaluating risk, those you take and those others take.

Why you should apply

You never stop. You get weirdly obsessed about a problem that doesn’t yet make sense, turn it every which way in your head until the explanation dawns.

You’re speaking up for the future user, the edge case, the doomsday design.

You’re someone who cares about what you do and the team you do it with, and want to work with others who do as well.

You’ll be on interview panels choosing your next colleagues, and you’ll take that seriously.

You are a Swiss army knife — all welcome.

You have built infrastructure at a slightly later stage than Ashby is at — you know how to deal with millions of data points, have seen great infrastructure make or break customer experience, and have automated everything from provisioning to monitoring and release process.

Why you should not apply

You don’t want to make your own decisions on what is the best paved road to build for Ashby, and expect a lead or manager to make the final call on what that is.

You hate SQL. We have a lot of features built around making the best out of data, and our platform engineers also sometimes dive into a gnarly report or advise engineers on a more performant data model to use.

You don’t want to code. Our SREs are some of our best software engineers and they are just as responsible for the application as the other engineering teams.

You’ve never delivered a project, on your own, without someone prodding you for updates.

Technology Stack

TypeScript (frontend & backend)

Node.js

React

Apollo GraphQL

Postgres

Redis

Datadog and Sentry on 100% cloud‑based (AWS) infra

We take developer experience and reliability seriously : all engineers are on call in a follow‑the‑sun model, and everyone contributes to developer tooling.

Interview Process

Our interview process wants to help you show your best self. We’ll dive into past projects and simulate working together via pair programming, writing product and tech specs collaboratively, and talking through decisions. There are no leetcode or whiteboard exercises. Our interview process is three rounds : Introduction call with Hiring Manager (15 to 30m, live), a technical screen where we pair in our actual codebase (1h, live), and three non‑coding interviews that focus on technical design, debugging incidents, and infrastructure (3h 15m, live can be split across multiple days). If we don’t give an offer, we’ll provide feedback!

Your First Three Months at Ashby

We want an exceptional onboarding experience for every new hire. At Ashby, your dev environment is set up with a single script, you push your first product change on day one, and you spend the rest of your time shipping product changes that give you a tour of our codebase and…

Application

If you are interested in applying for this job please press the Apply Button and follow the application process. Energy Jobline wishes you the very best of luck in your next career move.

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