Hi 👋🏾 I’m Abhik, Ashby's Co-Founder and VP of Engineering. Our engineering culture strives to recreate the environments where we did our best work as ICs – where we had the ownership and agency to impact our users with creative and innovative software.

I started my career building software for artists in the Visual Effects industry. It was a formative experience for me as a software engineer, not just because the work was fun but because success relied on my ability to be a product manager and designer. I talked to artists to understand their needs. I came up with ideas. I did industry research, designed interfaces, and prototyped ideas. I watched artists use what I built and decided what to tackle in the next iteration. No daily stand-ups, no t-shirt sizing, no planning meetings.

It was an exhilarating experience to have straight out of college. I studied computer science to solve problems using software in a way that wasn’t possible before – not be a JIRA jockey. My first job allowed me to do just that, and I felt creative and fulfilled.

When I moved to technology startups, I saw my role narrow (significantly as the company grew), and the enjoyment of building software went with it. It was disheartening because, in Visual Effects, I witnessed some of the most innovative ideas from experienced engineers who blended their technical skills with customer empathy and business context. Such ideas came from the engineers' in-depth knowledge of how software is built, allowing them to create new abstractions or implement technology in novel ways. It’s a level of creativity that is difficult for most product managers or designers to achieve.

I still saw these ideas in technology startups, but as the team grew, these ideas often came to fruition through force of will and the engineer’s ability to push back against the company’s culture (rather than any encouragement from it). Engineering became narrowed to implementation and delivery, partly due to the influence of other departments and partly due to the influx of "Agile" processes like sprint planning.

I don’t want that to happen at Ashby. We’re building an environment that is optimistic about what engineers can own and achieve. An environment that embraces the innovative engineers, and frankly, often stays out of their way. As a Product Engineer, you’ll take ownership over a large portion of one of our products and own projects end-to-end (wearing hats traditionally worn by product and design). You’ll research competitors, write product specs, make wireframes, and more. To ground it with examples, product engineers at Ashby have:

• Designed and built automated candidate scheduling. This feature automates scheduling by calculating possible times from a pool of interviewers and other constraints, and then presenting these times to the candidate for selection via our responsive web app.

• Built a generalized filter architecture that allows users to create complex filters for any record with a consistent UI and compile it to SQL in our backend. Many user-facing features use it.

• Spec-ed, designed, and implemented a feature that allows users to complete signing offers entirely within Ashby. This project involved talking to customers to understand their requirements, deciding what technologies to use, building a prototype, and working with other team members to integrate the final implementation into additional features.

What We’re Building

Talent teams aspire to build a hiring process that identifies great candidates, moves them quickly through the interview process, and provides an excellent experience for the candidate. To accomplish this, recruiters perform thousands of daily tasks to coordinate and relay information between candidates, interviewers, and hiring managers. Teams struggle to keep up!

Scheduling a final round is an excellent example of our customers' challenges. A recruiter needs to collect availability from the candidate, identify potential interviewers, perform “Calendar Tetris” to find who is available to interview the candidate, schedule on the earliest date possible, and perform any last-minute adjustments as availability changes. They must perform this while considering the interview load on each individual and whether interviewers need to be trained and shadowing others. 🥵

Ashby provides talent teams with 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 put a lot of effort into designing products that are approachable to beginners but mastered and extended by power users. In many ways, spreadsheets set the bar here (and are what we often replace!).

We have many customers, great revenue growth, years of runway, and amazing investors like YCombinator, Elad Gil, and Lachy Groom. I’ll share more once we meet.