Hi 👋🏾, I’m Abhik, Ashby’s Co-Founder and CTO. Ashby is growing fast, which means exponential growth across every product metric: jobs, applications, interviews, you name it. We’re not slowing down, and as a result, keeping Ashby performant and reliable is a company priority. We need your leadership to do that now and in the future.

We’ve already assembled a fantastic Platform & Infrastructure team of 11 engineers (all Senior+, >70% Staff), and they’ve done an excellent job handling our growth, but the management and leadership of Platform & Infrastructure have been diffused across our Engineering leaders. As we hit our next level of scale, it’s time for us to hire an Engineering leader responsible for performance and reliability, and for building out the team that ensures those. Hopefully, that’s you!

The Role

In this role, you will report directly to me, and your responsibilities will include:

Building and maintaining a long-term vision and 6-month roadmap for Platform & Infrastructure.

Growing the Platform & Infrastructure team. You’ll hire ICs, managers, and build out a headcount plan. This will include determining if more specialized roles need to be established (e.g., DB Admin).

Building and maintaining an excellent relationship with Product Engineering. The ideal state is that Product Engineering can move incredibly fast independently without breaking performance or reliability, and Platform & Infrastructure doesn’t feel like they’re always cleaning up someone else’s “mess.” Today, there’s a great relationship, but there’s always room for improvement!

Assessing and improving our monitoring and incident management process. Again, we’re doing relatively well here, but there’s always room to improve. For example, making uptime measurement easier and improving coordination with Support during incidents.

Maintaining vendor relationships and negotiating pricing for our critical hosting and observability infrastructure, including AWS, ClickHouse, Datadog, and Braintrust. They have a meaningful impact on gross margin and need to be kept in check.

You’ve managed managers. Managing other leaders is a very different ball game, and not everyone enjoys it or thrives in it. Within your first 6 months, you’ll most likely have to hire a manager underneath you.

If you have experience managing developer experience and developer tools, building out a dedicated team for DevEx. If you don’t have experience here, DevEx will report into Product Engineering. Happy to discuss once we meet!

A big part of our secret sauce is how we run Engineering. We achieve incredible speed and quality by discarding many industry norms and being optimistic about Engineers. We consider what makes exceptional Engineers exceptional, then figure out how to hire them and build an environment that gives them the freedom and agency to be exceptional. You’ll be a key leader in ensuring that continues!

The Qualifications

We’re entrusting you with a company priority, so we want you to know how to scale products and build the great teams that do that. This means:

You played an important role leading a company through a high-growth period (either as an IC Lead or Engineering Leader). You had to make high-quality decisions under pressure. That often meant striking a balance between short-term fixes to keep the product from falling over and long-term investments to ensure it didn’t happen again.

You have experience hiring and building hiring processes, and enjoy it! You’ve designed interviews, interview loops, and led hiring strategy.

You have a track record of excellent collaboration with other departments. You were a key contributor to company-level initiatives that involved Product Engineering, Product, Sales, or Support. Those departments felt heard and supported, yet positively challenged by you.

You are knowledgeable about platform and infrastructure technologies, networking, and hardware. You know how Kubernetes goes beyond a Container Orchestration Platform, how traffic flows between Load Balancers and Pods, and how the intricacies of the underlying hardware can cause Cloud abstractions to break, etc.