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. Similarly, you’re an engineer who wants to build a “paved road” that excellent engineering teams can safely take to the moon and back.

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 towards one or the other. 

About the role and how we work

I’m Elénie, a Director of Engineering at Ashby. I’ve been an SRE for a long time, but I didn’t begin there. I started my career building algorithms to process large 3D models for civil engineers and route packets faster for telecommunications (“real infrastructure”). There, I found that what makes or breaks the customer experience is the result of often unseen but critical infrastructure work. This critical work makes the admin UI on the website load fast at the airport, the drafts of your models recoverable if your laptop crashes, the data you dearly value, safe.

That’s why I switched from working on product to infrastructure: we’ve all seen those outages first reported by a customer because there’s no monitoring, those cute sadface graphics so you’ll be less angry at the software when it inevitably crashes, those late nights your coworkers spend toiling away at failed releases, missing database rows, or misbehaving firewalls. I wanted to create fully-automated solutions to those reliability issues, and use software instead of processes to make infrastructure updates, inter-team schema changes, or data access safe. This can work very well: the systems I built reduced yearly downtime to minutes, and some were even fun. I believe training people starts with meeting them where they are, and infrastructure engineers have empathy as a core skill.

As a Platform Engineer at Ashby, you’ll do that and more. Every Product Engineer owns their projects and ships with minimal oversight. We, as SREs, approach this from a practical view. We don’t put roadblocks to ensure security when common sense will do and we don’t build processes like change management boards around the lowest common denominator. But with great power comes great responsibility: we handle personal and confidential data about some of the biggest decisions we ever make at work. As we grow, more and bigger customers rely on us to be reliable and secure and how we operate internally will need to evolve.

We’re at an inflection point where our ability to scale and deliver a seamless experience has a make-or-break impact – we have some of the fastest growing companies using our platform every day to hire hundreds of people per month. We need someone like you to make good decisions, debug thorny issues, and build us a future-proof platform that can withstand this scale. Our small but mighty infrastructure team has set up a secure and simple environment (we don’t believe in spinning up a new service unless necessary!) for our growing product team to build in. That’s where you come in: you, too, will own projects end-to-end and have an impact on core parts of the Ashby developer and user experience. For instance, you could work on:

• 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.

We’re looking for someone who can build systems that an engineer 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 in an SRE