Product Engineer - Integrations

Posted Apr 15

Hi 👋 I’m Colin, director of European Engineering. I’m excited to open this position because it’s a great foundational role for someone that enjoys tying different systems together and enabling users to get the most out of all their tools. As an integrations engineer, you’ll take ownership of a highly visible part of our product and own projects end-to-end. You’ll, for example, write product specs, and implement integrations from frontend to backend. To ground it with examples, integrations engineers at Ashby have:

  • Integrated background check services to speed up the process once a decision to hire has been made
  • Enabled automatic posting of jobs on services like Indeed and ZipRecruiter - giving customers more inbound applications
  • Sped up the assessment process for our customers by introducing technical screening services via platforms like HackerRank
  • Created reusable components to make it easier to build similar integration types
  • Extended the functionality and UI of Ashby to allow integration partners to deeply embed their products in Ashby

These projects reflect what we’re accomplishing at Ashby: improving the productivity of working professionals (starting with talent teams) with intelligent and powerful software. We put a lot of effort into designing products that are approachable to beginners but mastered & extended by power users. In many ways, spreadsheets set the bar here.

As well as integrating Ashby with other systems, you’ll be responsible for maintaining and developing our own API for others to connect to. As part of this, you’ll be responsible for maintaining the documentation and helping partners integrate with our API.

We have many customers, great revenue growth, years of runway, and amazing investors like YCombinator, Elad Gil, and Lachy Groom.

Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture is motivated by Benji’s (our CEO) and Abhik’s (our VP of Engineering) belief that a small talented team, given the right environment, can build high-quality software fast (and work regular hours!).

Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate

Our engineering team (and the team at large) consists of lifelong learners who are humble and kind (meet them here!). These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally (we filter for it in interviews). 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 can focus 36h out of a 40h work week (Abhik wrote about it here).

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:

  • Great developer tooling. Our CI/CD takes ~10m, and we deploy at least 10x a day. Everyone on the team has contributed to developer experience 💪
  • Building blocks to create powerful and customizable products fast. At the core of Ashby is a set of common components (analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) which we are constantly improving. Each improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app (short video below).

Here’s an impromptu quote from Arjun in our company Slack of what it’s like to build a feature at Ashby:

And a demo of one of these building blocks:

Give Engineers Ownership & Autonomy

We, as engineers, find clever ways to solve problems, which amplifies when we deeply understand the problem. Benji and Abhik did their best work as engineers when they had a deep understanding of the end-user and the business and ownership over the solution. Our engineering culture reflects this experience: engineers own projects end-to-end, from speaking with users to writing product specs to UX design. These are skills that we often don’t get to practice as engineers, and, at Ashby, we provide mentorship to grow them and help from the team where you want it.

Put Effort into Diversity

Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. As the father of two young girls, I want to see them grow up in a world where all industries are open and welcoming to everyone, regardless of race, gender, or preferences. Helping to build a more diverse team at Ashby is my way of contributing to this change.

Today, 26% 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.

Interview Process

At Ashby, our team and interview process want to help you show your best self. We’ll dive into past projects and simulate working together via pair programming, writing tech specs collaboratively, and talking through decisions (no leetcode or whiteboard exercises). Our interview process is three rounds:

  1. 30-minute introduction call
  2. A take home technical screen
  3. A virtual on-site of 3 hours and 45 minutes (can be split across two days)

I will be your main point of contact and prep you for interviews. You’ll meet myself, Abhik plus 4 to 6 people in engineering (with 15 minutes in each interview to ask them questions). If we don’t give an offer, we’ll provide feedback!

Your First Two Months at Ashby

We want an exceptional onboarding experience for every new hire. At Ashby, your dev environment sets up with a single script, you push your first change on day one, and we spend the rest of the time building your confidence in our codebase and practices culminating in the delivery of a prominent, impactful feature. We’ll pair you with a peer who’ll guide you through your first tasks and be someone you rely on, from answering questions to pair programming.

Technology Stack

I’m sharing our tech stack with the caveat that we don’t require previous experience in all of it. We want you to be comfortable with Typescript and have some experience with a SQL-based database. Everything else is optional: Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, Redis.

Benefits

  • Competitive salary and equity.
  • 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.
  • Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year. Expect “Vacation?” in our one-on-one agenda until you start taking it 😅.
  • Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US. We plan to expand this to employees in other countries as situations arise.
  • Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. Get what you need to be happy and productive!
  • $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.
  • If you’re in the US, top-notch health insurance for you and your dependents with all premiums covered by us.

Ashby’s success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. We’re being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. I hope that excites you enough to apply.

Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.