Staff Platform Engineer - EU

Introduction to the Role

Ashby is seeking a rigorous, inquisitive, and driven platform software engineer who is passionate about coding and wants to propel the company into its next phase of growth. Ashby specializes in creating software that enables talent teams to conduct smooth, efficient, and respectful hiring processes. As a platform engineer, you will help build an infrastructure that supports engineers in delivering robust, scalable solutions with autonomy.

About Ashby's Infrastructure and Engineering Environment

The company supports prominent clients including Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake, boasting impressive growth metrics—the ARR is in the tens of millions, growing over 100% annually, with more than 2500 customers and excellent retention. Ashby values minimal oversight, empowering engineers to own and ship their projects end-to-end while maintaining high standards for security and reliability due to the confidential nature of the data managed.

Typical Projects and Your Responsibilities

• Enhance the custom dynamic recruiting DSL-to-SQL compiler and develop developer-friendly tools around it.
• Implement automated security and privacy guardrails protecting customer data.
• Facilitate rapid feature deployment through canary releases, phased rollouts, and feature flags, while managing system complexity and uptime.
• Create, measure, and maintain service level objectives and indicators in collaboration with business and engineering teams.
• Ensure external service communications are resilient with retries and circuit-breakers.
• Build infrastructure components to support event-driven architecture and data warehousing.

Candidate Profile

The ideal engineer is detail-oriented and enjoys building systems that prioritize reliability and maintainability without sacrificing developer usability. You must be comfortable evaluating and managing risk and have experience constructing infrastructure in fast-growing environments handling millions of data points.

Company Culture and Work Style

Ashby’s engineering culture promotes a small, capable team empowered to deliver high-quality software quickly and sustainably. The approach emphasizes minimal processes, significant ownership of projects by engineers, and collaboration through thoughtful, mainly asynchronous communication. The team values a work-life balance, low meeting overhead (less than two hours weekly), and opportunities for small regional meetups twice yearly.

Expectations and Work Environment

• Engineers are responsible for managing their projects independently, including scope management and progress tracking without dedicated project managers.
• The team encourages providing feedback and iterative improvement through code and written proposals.
• Focus on automated tooling, short CI/CD pipelines with frequent deployments, and AI-driven tools to enhance development productivity and software quality.

Additional Information - Why You Should or Shouldn’t Apply

Reasons to Apply:

• You are obsessively curious and eager to solve complex, ambiguous problems.
• You advocate for future users and are proactive in enhancing product quality and infrastructure.
• You seek a collaborative team of highly motivated and skilled engineers.
• You have experience managing infrastructure at a stage similar or beyond Ashby's, handling scale, automation, and complex systems troubleshooting.
• You embrace versatility, comfortable working on infrastructure updates, security, database optimization, Kubernetes debugging, and languages like TypeScript.

Reasons Not to Apply:

• You prefer external decision-making on technical direction rather than autonomous ownership.
• You dislike working with SQL and data-driven systems.
• You are not keen to write and review code regularly.
• You rely mainly on live meetings to communicate and struggle with asynchronous written communication.
• You require frequent supervision to deliver projects and lack self-driven project management skills.