Staff Platform Engineer - UK

We’re looking for a curious, rigorous, problem-hungry platform engineer (who codes!) 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. Hi I’m Colin, Head of EMEA Engineering. I’ve spent a number of years leading engineering teams in startups, and that has always included being close to infrastructure teams - no matter what name they’ve worn (SRE, infrastructure, platform, etc). I’ve got my hands dirty building the initial infrastructure for startups and know the value a talented infrastructure engineer brings. We’re always looking to give our customers more powerful hiring software, and building new product features often requires new pieces of infrastructure. 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. 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. 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 Implement the infrastructure to support an event-driven architecture and data warehouse 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’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’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’ll get to do infrastructure updates, security enforcements, database optimization, Kubernetes debugging, and digging through Typescript traces figuring out what doesn’t work. Our leads (and managers) give ample commentary and feedback on technical decisions and how they’re made, but you ship what you want to build and are accountable for it. You hate SQL. We have a lot of features built around making the best out of data, and our platform engineers also sometimes dive into a gnarly report or advise engineers on a more performant data model to use. Our SREs are some of our best software engineers and they are just as responsible for the application as the other engineering teams – albeit at a platform level. We’re a very async culture and written communication (and code) is how changes get made. You’ve never delivered a project, on your own, without someone prodding you for updates. We have no project or delivery managers to fill your calendar with busy work, but the flip side is you have to do your project management, seek the help you need to get unstuck and cut scope when it’s worthwhile. 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. What We’re Building When we started Ashby, we saw the opposite with Talent Acquisition software. Recruiting teams were leveling up how they did their work, but instead of software meeting this new standard, it held them back. Recruiting teams wanted to schedule candidates faster, track interviewer preparation and quality, and do it with half the headcount. As hiring managers, we know TA is a critical function, and as engineers, we know software can do better. Software that’s intelligent and powerful. Software that provides insights into where they’re failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they’re underwater with. Engineering Culture Our Engineering Culture Is Motivated By Abhik And Benji’s (our Co‑founders) Belief That a Small Talented Team, Given The Right Environment, Can Build High-quality Software Fast (and Work Regular Hours!). Putting effort into building a diverse team They took customer problems and relentlessly drove them to solutions that were not only successful but often brilliant and creative. So, at Ashby, every Engineer runs their project. Product Managers) and pull folks in to help (e.g., It’s a new level of ownership for many engineers, but we’d rather an engineer fail a bit and coach up their skills than use process as a crutch. Our engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind. We Built Ashby With The Quality, Breadth, And Depth That Many Customers Would Expect From Much Larger Teams Over Larger Time Scales. Everyone on the team has contributed to our 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) that we constantly improve. AI-powered tooling. We think of AI as a way to automate the mundane parts of building and maintaining high-quality software. Competitive salary and equity. Unlimited PTO, and we will encourage you to take it. A minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, covered by Ashby. Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. If you’re in the US, we offer top‑tier health insurance for you and your dependents, with 100% of premiums covered by Ashby. In other countries, we provide high‑quality supplemental health insurance for you and your dependents, also fully covered by us. We’re being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. 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. Compensation Range: £138K - £224K #