Senior Backend Engineer, API and Integrations Platform - EMEA

We’re looking for a talented backend engineer who wants to drive the future of Ashby’s API and Integrations Platform. Our product serves as a system of record for our customers. Ashby’s API is a foundation for other companies and entrepreneurs to build successful products and businesses. You will play a crucial role in improving our API’s flexibility, ease of use, and security to rival the quality of gold-standard APIs like Figma’s and Stripe’s. You’ll also build abstractions to help us quickly build integrations with other core systems like Google Workspace and Workday. These responsibilities require creativity, empathy, and serious architectural skill, so prepare for a challenge.

I’m Abhik, Ashby’s Co-Founder and VP of Engineering. I’ve led API teams at several companies and seen firsthand that the quality of a product’s API and integrations significantly impacts its business. In fact, at a previous company, I estimated that we lost 25% of potential customers because we didn’t have the integrations to connect our product to the rest of a customer’s technology stack. I lobbied leadership to create an API and integrations team and became its Product Manager. The engineer in me took pride in how our API was designed, the quality of our documentation, and being responsive to developer feedback. It resulted in a rich partner ecosystem that won us a lot of business and continues to flourish today.

At Ashby, we’re taking the same approach and have thought deeply about our API from day one (you can find an interview with our first engineer, Aaron Norby, about some of our design decisions here). As a result, the industry noticed. In just two years since our public launch, we’ve added over 100 integrations, and our partners love our API so much that they develop features for Ashby ahead of competitors:

We’re bringing you in to continue expanding our API's functionality and versatility. For instance, other engineers on this team have:

• Created a generic assessment API that’s empowered a variety of integrations (from background checks to coding tests to English tests) while creating a rich experience inside our product so our customers don’t have to hop between products in their day-to-day work.

• Designed systems that seamlessly move our customers’ data from competitors to Ashby in days (vs. industry standard of several months), allow them to use both systems simultaneously, and transition in-flight hiring processes so there is zero downtime switching. This is such a challenging problem that we use it as an interview question to distinguish Staff+ engineers.

• Built our Microsoft 365 integration in a few months to unlock business in Europe and non-tech industries. Part of this also required refactoring our Google Workspace integration so that both integrations reuse the same business logic for common tasks.

• Built an API and API docs that provide comprehensive data and runnable examples directly on the doc site. Partners rave about it and recommend it to others!

Why You Should or Shouldn’t Apply

You should apply if:

• Happy developers and customers are your happy place. You care deeply about their experience with the software you build and seek to understand them to empower a great experience.

• You care about the small things. A mismatched data model, wrong customer configuration, or oddly documented partner API is all that stands between you and complete chaos, and you fear none of it.

• You’ve tackled projects with a lot of product and technical ambiguity, and the intersection of the two is where you thrive. We’re not building a simple CRUD API, and many of the challenges we tackle require using your knowledge of our customers to build powerful abstractions and flexibility in the system to solve a class of problems.

• You are ambitious and always looking to improve your skills. For most engineers, this role will give you more freedom and responsibilities than you’ve experienced in the past. To thrive (and level up), you’ll need to be open to feedback (and we give lots of it).

• You’re not afraid to tackle any part of a technology stack. While this role is primarily backend, you do what’s necessary to successfully deliver a feature, including writing frontend. We’ll provide a supportive environment to do it successfully (e.g., design system, talented frontend engineers).

• You seek to create leverage in your work. The nature of software is that you can often automate or abstract what would be tedious, time-consuming work. Your impatience usually leads to new abstractions, tools to allow Support to debug before Engineering, new lint rules to prevent common bugs, etc.

You should not apply if:

• You like projects to take months to years. There’s always something new in this role and pragmatism is the name of the game. You’ll cut scope, make tradeoffs, and always be learning.

• You need a company-driven process and structure to get your projects across the finish line. Sprint planning and well-defined project management processes are things you need or look to others to lead. You’d rather focus on the technical details and challenges.

• You can get lost in the details. Once you start implementation, it can be hard to take a step back and think about the project as a whole. You like everything to be planned upfront.

• You haven’t led or taken ownership of projects before. You’re used to working with tech leads and taking on tasks they distribute.

• A tech lead, staff, or principal engineer, to you, is someone who spends most of their time project managing or doing architecture reviews. Our most tenured engineers spend most of their time building, and we often trust them with our most challenging problems. While they lead product and technical areas and help other engineers plan

What We’re Building

Talent teams aspire to build a hiring process that identifies great candidates, moves them quickly through the interview process, and provides an excellent experience for the candidate. To accomplish this, recruiters perform thousands of daily tasks to coordinate and relay information between candidates, interviewers, and hiring managers. Teams struggle to keep up!

Scheduling a final round is an excellent example of our customers' challenges. A recruiter needs to collect availability from the candidate, identify potential interviewers, perform “Calendar Tetris” to find who is available to interview the candidate, schedule on the earliest date possible, and perform any last-minute adjustments as availability changes. They must perform this while considering the interview load on each individual and whether interviewers need to be trained and shadowing others. 🥵

Ashby provides talent teams with intelligent and powerful software that provides insights into where they’re failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they’re underwater with. We put a lot of effort into designing products that are approachable to beginners but mastered and extended by power users. In many ways, spreadsheets set the bar here (and are what we often replace!).

We have many customers, great revenue growth, years of runway, and amazing investors like YCombinator, Elad Gil, and Lachy Groom. I’ll share more once we meet.

Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture is motivated by Benji’s (my co-founder and CEO) and my belief that a small talented team, given the right environment, can build high-quality software fast (and work regular hours!).

Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate

Our engineering team (and the team at large) consists of lifelong learners who are humble and kind (meet them here!). These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally (we filter for it in interviews). We combine this with research, prototyping, and written proposals to see around corners and get feedback from the team across time zones. Focus time is something that we hold sacred, and, with thoughtful and deliberate communication, engineers are in <2h meetings per week (I wrote about it here).

Increase Leverage, not Team Size

We built Ashby with the quality, breadth, and depth that many customers would expect from much larger teams over larger time scales. We’ve done this through investment in:

• Great developer tooling. Our CI/CD takes ~10m, and we deploy at least 10x a day. Everyone on the team has contributed to 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) which we are constantly improving. Each improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app (short video below).

Here’s an impromptu quote from Arjun in our company Slack of what it’s like to build a feature at Ashby:

And a demo of one of these building blocks:

Give Engineers Ownership & Agency

We, as engineers, find clever ways to solve problems, which amplifies when we deeply understand the problem. Benji and I did our best work as engineers when we had a deep understanding of the end-user and the business and ownership over the solution. Our engineering culture reflects this experience: engineers own projects end-to-end, from speaking with users to writing product specs to UX design. These are skills that we often don’t get to practice as engineers, and, at Ashby, we provide mentorship to grow them and help from the team where you want it.

Put Effort into Diversity

Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Having seen my mother and partner build their careers as minority women in non-diverse fields, I want to make sure Ashby creates opportunities for the next generation of engineers from underrepresented groups.

Today, 26% of engineers at Ashby are from underrepresented groups. It’s not great, and we are taking conscious steps to improve, like sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, no leetcode interviews, and more.

Interview Process

At Ashby, our team and interview process want to help you show your best self. We’ll dive into past projects and simulate working together via pair programming, writing tech specs collaboratively, and talking through decisions (no leetcode or whiteboard exercises). Our interview process is three rounds:

1. 30-minute introduction call

2. A technical screen (take home or 75-minute in-person)

3. A virtual on-site of 4 hours and 15 minutes (can be split across two days)

Your hiring manager will be your main point of contact and prep you for interviews. You’ll meet 4 to 6 people in engineering (with 15 minutes in each interview to ask them questions). If we don’t give an offer, we’ll provide feedback!

Your First Two Months at Ashby

We want an exceptional onboarding experience for every new hire. At Ashby, your dev environment sets up with a single script, you push your first change on day one, and we spend the rest of the time building your confidence in our codebase and practices culminating in the delivery of a prominent, impactful feature. We’ll pair you with a peer who’ll guide you through your first tasks and be someone you rely on, from answering questions to pair programming.

Technology Stack

I’m sharing our tech stack with the caveat that we don’t require previous experience in it (but a love of typed languages is helpful 😀): TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, Redis.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.

• 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.

• Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year. Expect “Vacation?” in our one-on-one agenda until you start taking it 😅.

• Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US. We plan to expand this to employees in other countries as situations arise.

• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. Get what you need to be happy and productive!

• $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.

• If you’re in the US, top-notch health insurance for you and your dependents with all premiums covered by us.

Ashby’s success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. We’re being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. I hope that excites you enough to apply.

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. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.