Platform Engineer, EU

About The Role And How We Work

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. The rigour, the discipline, the peace and quiet when everything just hums along.

Our infrastructure is in a good place for now. Nothing is static. Ashby continues to grow rapidly, putting strain on our existing infrastructure. We’re always looking to give our customers more powerful hiring software, and building new product features often requires new pieces of infrastructure.

Having herded plenty of snowflake servers in the past, I’ve learned there’s a better way. I place a lot of value on infrastructure‑as‑code. 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. We handle personal and confidential data about some of the biggest decisions we ever make  we grow, more and bigger customers rely on us to be reliable and secure and how we operate internally will need to evolve.

We’re at an inflection point where our ability to scale and deliver a seamless experience has a make‑or‑break impact. Our small but mighty infrastructure team has set up a secure and simple environment—no 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.

• Optimise 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

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 today, 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,…