Senior Software Engineer, Product Engineering

Hi I’m Abhik, Ashby's Co-Founder and VP of Engineering. We’re looking for a versatile, persistent product engineer who’s not afraid to set up reusable building blocks across the stack and advocate for the time and space to do so. All our engineers ship features end‑to‑end at a high pace. If that speaks to you, read on.

What Ashby gives you in return is the best of both early and growth‑stage environments: the agency and no‑nonsense of a seed startup, and the product‑market fit and scale of a growth‑stage startup. We write product specs, make product and design decisions, and build in an almost‑no‑meeting culture while serving tens of thousands of daily users who depend on our software.

We have notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. Our growth and retention metrics are best‑in‑class among our peers: tens of millions in ARR, >100% year‑over‑year growth, very low churn, and many years of runway.

You’ve probably seen this role posted before, and it’s because we’re always expanding the team. We’re building products beyond Talent Acquisition and aim to respond to every application within 3‑4 days.

Our engineering culture strives to recreate the environments where we did our best work as ICs—owning decisions normally made by product and design. As a Product Engineer, you’ll take ownership over a large portion of one of our products and own projects end‑to‑end, wearing hats traditionally worn by product and design. You’ll research competitors, write product specs, make wireframes, and more.

• Designed and built automated interview scheduling
• Built a generalized declarative filter architecture that allows users to create complex filters for any record and compiles it to SQL in the backend
• Specced, designed, and implemented a feature that allows users to complete signing offers entirely within Ashby

We see the opposite of what’s needed in Talent Acquisition software. We build platform‑level tools that automate the “Calendar Tetris” and provide insights into where recruiters are struggling. By improving scheduling, interview load balancing, and onboarding, we help TA teams work more efficiently and give other functions a taste of high‑standard tooling.

Software engineers come in many flavors, not all of which fit our model. Below we outline the fit criteria and warning signs.

• Not afraid to tackle any part of a technology stack and thrive on product and technical ambiguity.
• Aims for the right balance between speed and quality, prioritizing customer value over rushed releases.
• Communicates clearly, collaborates with stakeholders, and owns responsibilities without constant supervision.
• Creates leverage by abstracting repetitive work and building reusable tools.

Put another way, you shouldn’t apply if:

• You view a tech lead as primarily a project manager or architect; our senior engineers build and lead through ownership.
• You need rigid sprint planning or process to complete work; we prefer minimal process and ownership.
• You only want “exciting” work and avoid routine investigations.
• You quickly get lost in details and prefer everything planned upfront.
• You have never led or owned projects and rely heavily on direction from tech leads.
• You want to teach early‑career engineers; our team is mostly senior, so mentorship opportunities are limited.

• Minimal process with ownership over decisions normally made by product and design.
• Natural collaboration and deliberate communication.
• Investing in tools and abstractions that give us leverage.
• Putting effort into building a diverse team.

Our team and interview process help you show your best self. We focus on past projects and simulate working together via pair programming, writing product and tech specs, and discussing decisions. There are no leetcode or whiteboard exercises.

• Introduction call with Hiring Manager (15–30m, live)
• A technical screen where we pair in our actual codebase (1h, live)
• Three non‑coding interviews focusing on product thinking, technical design, and infrastructure (3h 15m, live; can be split across days)

Depending on leadership…