Who you are

• 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 in today’s world, you have to be extremely comfortable evaluating risk, those you take and those others take
• 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’ll search every rock, inventory every clue, hunt every mismatch
• We do that, too - together we’ll be armed with state-of-the-art monitoring tools and an impressive amount of data, and join you in the adventure
• You don’t take shortcuts
• You’re speaking up for the future user, the edge case, the doomsday design
• You know product engineers want to build it with you, and see them as allies, where you give them the power and knowledge to access greater things
• 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 only want to work with people who make you better, and want to make you better
• You’ve built infrastructure at a slightly later stage than Ashby is at - you know how to deal with millions of data points, have seen great (or not great) infrastructure make or break customer experience, and have automated everything from provisioning to monitoring and release process
• You’re a Swiss army knife (all nationalities welcome ;) )
• You’ll get every hard problem the company faces
• You’ll get to do infrastructure updates, security enforcements, database optimization, Kubernetes debugging, and digging through Typescript traces figuring out what doesn’t work
• You probably don’t feel like an expert at at least some of that.
• And that appeals to you

What the job involves

• 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
• As a Platform Engineer at Ashby, you’ll get to dive into scaling problems, add new capabilities to our platform, and think about how our entire team interacts with infrastructure
• All our own engineers own their projects end-to-end and ship with minimal oversight
• 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 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
• I’m sharing our tech stack with the caveat that we don’t require previous experience in it: TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, Redis
• We use 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

The application process

• Introduction call with Hiring Manager (15 to 30m, live)
• A technical screen where we pair in our actual codebase (1h, live)
• Three non-coding interviews that focus on technical design, debugging incidents, and infrastructure (3h 15m, live can be split across multiple days)
• Depending on our leadership team’s bandwidth, we may start with an additional 30m screen with a recruiter
• Your hiring manager will be your main point of contact and prep you for interviews. Each round will have written guidance so you know what to expect (you’ll need minimal preparation). You’ll meet 4 to 6 people in engineering (with 5-15 minutes in each interview to ask them questions)
• If we don’t give an offer, we’ll provide feedback!

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year
• Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave
• 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
• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget
• $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval