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. At Ashby, all our engineers ship features end‑to‑end at a high pace.

What Ashby gives you in return is the best of both early and growth‑stage environments. 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.

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. Our engineering culture strives to recreate the environments where we did our best work as ICs – where we had the ownership and agency to impact our users with creative and innovative software. I started my career building software for artists in the Visual Effects industry.

It was a formative experience for me as a software engineer because success relied on my ability to be a product manager and designer. No daily stand‑ups, no t‑shirt sizing, no planning meetings. I studied computer science to solve problems, not tickets, and this felt exactly like that.

I not only felt creative and fulfilled but the agency and ownership we were given as engineers powered an incredible amount of innovation. Innovation came differently (or not at all) at technology startups beyond the seed stage, often through an engineer’s force of will and ability to push back against culture (rather than any encouragement from it). Engineering was narrowed to implementation and delivery, partly due to the influence of other departments and partly due to the influx of “Agile” processes like sprint planning.

At Ashby, we’re building an environment that is optimistic about what engineers can own and achieve. 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). To ground it with examples, product engineers at Ashby have: 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. 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

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. Recruiting teams wanted to schedule candidates faster, track interviewer preparation and quality, and do it with half the headcount.

As hiring managers, we know TA is a critical function, and as engineers, we know software can do better. Software that’s intelligent and powerful.



Software that provides insights into where they’re failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they’re underwater with.

Software Engineers Come In Many

Flavors, Not All Of Which Fit Our Model.

Here Are Some Things To Help

You Decide If This Fits You And What You’re Looking For You do what’s necessary to successfully deliver a feature, whether writing frontend or choosing new infrastructure. 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. We took four years to launch publicly because convincing customers to switch required a high‑quality product. 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! The nature of software is that you can often automate or abstract what would be tedious, time‑consuming work. Your impatience usually leads to recent abstractions, tools to allow support to debug before engineering, new lint rules to prevent common bugs, etc.

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.

You need 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.

We’re building a team of kind, collaborative folks. Customer issues and investigations are distributed across the team, including our high‑level ICs. Once you start implementation, it can be hard to take a step back and think about the project as a whole.

You haven’t led or taken ownership of projects before. You want to mentor earlier‑career engineers. We rely on engineers owning their projects, so we need engineers with that experience. More than 90% of the team would be considered Senior or above in the industry today, so mentorship opportunities are very limited.

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!). Putting effort into building a diverse team. They took customer problems and relentlessly drove them to solutions that were not only successful but often brilliant and creative. So, at Ashby, every Engineer runs their project.

Product

Managers (and Designers) build strategy, do customer research, and hand off problem briefs to Engineers.

Product





Managers) and pull folks in to help (e.g., Our engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind (meet them here!). These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally.

We Built Ashby With The

Quality, Breadth, And Depth That Many Customers Would Expect From Much Larger Teams Over Larger Time Scales. 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.

AI‑powered tooling. We think of AI as a way to automate the mundane parts of building and maintaining high‑quality software. We use a combination of third‑party and internally built tools that, for instance, auto‑triage customer issues, suggest fixes, prototype ideas, generate production‑ready code, and conduct code reviews.

Put Effort into Diversity

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, 25% of engineers and 50% of our engineering leaders at Ashby are from underrepresented groups. We are taking conscious steps to improve, like sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, no leetcode interviews, and more.

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. 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). You’ll meet 4 to 6 people in engineering (with 5‑15 minutes in each interview to ask them questions). 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. you’ll have a peer paired with you to answer questions, pair program, and check in often to see if you need help.

The rest of the team will run training sessions on our culture, product, engineering process, and technical architecture.

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), React, GraphQL API, Node.js, Postgres, Redis. When they joined Ashby, many of our engineers switched from other languages like Swift and Kotlin (Ben), platforms like iOS (Tom) and Windows (Sergey).

Competitive salary and equity. A minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, covered by Ashby. Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. If you’re in the US, we offer top‑tier health insurance for you and your dependents, with 100% of premiums covered by Ashby.

In other countries, we provide high‑quality supplemental health insurance for you and your dependents, also fully covered by us. 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.

📌 Staff Product Engineer, Canada (Toronto)
🏢 Tensec
📍 Toronto