Engineering Manager

Hi I’m Colin, Director of Engineering, Europe. How do you feel about software engineers writing product specs, making product decisions, and not breaking down projects into individual tickets? If that sounds exciting (even if a bit scary), read on because I’m looking for an engineering manager to help us build a different type of engineering team and culture at Ashby.

We want a team that can take fully owned projects and deliver them with minimal intervention. Engineers should be able to choose what to build, write specs, and set directions. Our processes should encourage ownership, not bureaucracy.

Our engineering leaders focus on building their team, coaching them to thrive with ownership, and creating an environment that empowers them to do their best work consistently, with minimal distraction. For junior EMs we limit to around six direct reports, keeping the focus on people rather than processes.

We’ve already assembled an experienced, talented, and collaborative team of 25+ engineers. As an engineering manager, you will help me grow and manage this growing team of engineers in Europe.

• Provide feedback on product and technical specs to help engineers identify where to cut scope or improve quality. You influence and coach ICs to reach the right decisions.
• Grow engineers to handle large, loosely defined projects, delivering them with little intervention. They still ask for help when needed, but the difference is that they’re driving.
• Jump into our systems and code to debug a customer issue, ship a small bug fix, or improve our developer experience.
• Improve how we generate and simulate data in demo accounts. It’s a project off the critical path that keeps you up to date on the codebase while impacting the business across Engineering, QA, and Sales.

I learned early that a supportive manager who asks thoughtful questions can make a huge difference. I also experienced the opposite, which motivated me to become a manager. I love solving deep, complex problems that have long‑term impact on the company and people’s lives. I also enjoy staying technical: I spend mornings writing code to improve tests or abstractions. If I couldn’t be a manager, I’d be happy as an individual contributor.

I’m looking for someone who is passionate about both management and being technical, spot patterns, improve processes, and build automation that powers those improvements.

• You love being technical and can hold in-depth conversations with direct reports from infrastructure to backend to frontend.
• You enjoy management problems. You get excited about driving people to be their best, giving difficult feedback, and building systems that facilitate that.
• You hold your team to a high standard and don’t shy away from getting into the details, even with top performers.
• You are an excellent and empathetic communicator, able to navigate beliefs, opinions, and past experiences to convince and be open to feedback.
• You know what exceptional engineers look like and understand how to recruit them and grow them.
• You’re good at thinking about product, business, and design, but you prefer to build a team that makes the best decisions, not to be the sole decision‑maker.
• You thrive in high‑trust, high‑autonomy environments. We’re a young startup where leaders wear multiple hats and you’ll build your own high‑speed onboarding through feedback loops.

• You don’t enjoy coding or can’t find time to stay up to date on technology.
• You got into management only as a growth path option.
• You want to make all product decisions instead of empowering your team.
• You’re fine with a team of engineers that are early‑career or mid‑career and don’t thrive with ownership or autonomy.
• A staff or principal engineer for you is someone who spends most of their time project‑managing or doing architecture reviews.
• You are not optimistic or convinced we can build a large engineering team differently than the status quo. You think that at some size processes must be implemented for consistent delivery.

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