Principal Product Engineer, EU

Base pay range

Hi ? ? I’m Abhik, Ashby's Co-Founder and VP of Engineering. We’re looking for an ambitious
- stack engineer who is
- focused on solving customer problems and making the right long‑term investments to solve them not only today but in our future features and products.

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: you write product specs, make product and design decisions, and build in an almost‑no‑meeting culture. While also the product‑market fit and scale of a growth‑stage startup: tens of thousands of daily users who depend on your software and eagerly await your next feature.

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

You’ve probably seen this role posted before, and it’s because we’re always expanding the team (we’re on track to double this year). We’re bubbling with ideas on how to support Talent Acquisition through software, and we’ve started the journey of building products beyond Talent Acquisition. We read every application and aim to respond to yours within 3-4 days (often sooner).

• Designed and built automated interview scheduling. This feature automates scheduling by calculating possible times from a pool of interviewers and other constraints, and then presenting these times to the candidate for selection via our responsive web app. This solves the “Calendar Tetris” problem I talk about in “What We’re Building. ”
• Built a generalized declarative filter architecture that allows users to create complex filters for any record with a consistent UI and compile it to SQL in our backend. Many user‑facing features use it.
• Specced, designed, and implemented a feature that allows users to complete signing offers entirely within Ashby. This project involved talking to customers to understand their requirements, deciding what technologies to use, building a prototype, and working with other team members to integrate the final implementation into additional features.

What We’re Building

As engineers, we are used to tooling that makes us better at what we do. 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.

Scheduling a final round is an excellent example. Recruiting teams wanted to schedule candidates faster, track interviewer preparation and quality, and do it with half the headcount. A recruiter needed to manually collect availability from the candidate, identify qualified interviewers, perform “Calendar Tetris” to find who is available to interview the candidate, schedule on the earliest date possible, and make any last‑minute adjustments as availability changed. They must do this while considering the interview load on each individual and whether interviewers need to be trained and shadowing others.

As hiring managers, we know TA is a critical function, and as engineers, we know software can do better. So, we built and continue to build Ashby to give TA teams the highest standard of tooling—software that’s intelligent and powerful, provides insights into where they’re failing, and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they’re underwater with. We want other functions and departments to be jealous of what TA teams can do with Ashby, and today they often are!

Why You Should or Shouldn’t Apply

• You’re not afraid to tackle any part of a technology stack. You do what’s necessary to successfully deliver a feature, whether writing frontend or choosing new infrastructure. We’ll provide a supportive environment to do it successfully (e. g. , design system, SRE team).
• You’ve tackled projects with a lot of product and technical ambiguity, and you thrive at the intersection of the two. We’re not building a simple CRUD app, and many of the challenges we tackle require you to use your knowledge of our customers to build powerful abstractions and flexibility in the system to solve a class of problems.
• You know how to strike the right balance between speed and quality. Ashby wasn’t built quickly. We took four years to launch publicly because convincing customers to switch required a high‑quality product. However, time isn’t infinite, especially for a startup, so we still move with urgency—we’ve built the equivalent of three or more VC‑backed startups with a very small team.
• 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 an excellent collaborator and communicator. Ownership and freedom don’t mean you work in a vacuum. You’ll need to vet your decisions with the appropriate stakeholders, keep them up to date when necessary, and work with other engineers to get your projects across the finish line. Clear and concise communication helps a lot here!
• 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.

Put Another Way, You Shouldn’t Apply If

• You need
  - 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 only want to do exciting work. We’re building a team of kind, collaborative folks. Customer issues and investigations are distributed across the team, including our high‑level ICs.
• 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 distributed by them.
• You want to mentor earlier‑career engineers. We rely on engineers owning their projects, so we need engineers with that experience. This requires the team to be reasonably tenured. More than 90% of the team would be considered Senior or above in the industry today, so mentorship opportunities are very limited.
• To you, a tech lead, staff, or principal engineer 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 their most challenging work, it’s not a requirement, nor do engineers need their sign‑off.

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!). We Do It Through

• 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.

Minimal Process & Lots of Ownership

The best engineers we’ve worked with delivered reliably magical outcomes. They took customer problems and relentlessly drove them to solutions that were not only successful but often brilliant and creative. While they did this with minimal oversight, stakeholders were never in the dark as to what was going on, and no setback was a surprise.

Traditional product‑development processes aren’t meant for the best engineers. Their purpose is to create consistent outcomes regardless of the engineer’s skill.

Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate

Our engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind. These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally. 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.

We also meet in person at least twice a year, once as a department and once as a company. You also have a small budget to meet up with folks in your city/region.

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 15x a day. A debugger that works out of the box. 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. Each improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app.

Put Effort into Diversity

Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. . . . Today, 21% 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 product and tech specs collaboratively, and talking through decisions. There are no leetcode or whiteboard exercises.

Our Interview Process Is Three Rounds

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

Depending on our leadership team’s bandwidth, we may start with an additional 30m screen with a recruiter. Your hiring manager will be your main point of contact and prep you for interviews.

Your First Three Months at Ashby

We want an exceptional onboarding experience for every new hire. At Ashby, your dev environment is set up with a single script, you push your first product change on day one, and you spend the rest of your time shipping product changes that give you a tour of our codebase and best practices. The product changes increase in scope and ambiguity from simple copy changes to the delivery of a prominent, impactful feature. Your manager will do a 30, 60, and 90‑day review to give feedback and calibrate on how we work together.

Technology Stack

Type
Script (frontend & backend), React, Graph
QL API, Node. js, Postgres, Redis.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.
• 10‑year exercise window for stock options.
• Unlimited PTO.
• A minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave.
• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget.
• $100/month education budget.
• Top‑tier health insurance for US; supplemental insurance for other countries.

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.

Seniority level

• Mid- Senior level

Employment type

• Full‑time

Job function

• Engineering and Information Technology
• Software Development

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