Head of Platform & Infrastructure Engineering

The posting, as Ashby wrote it

Hi 👋🏾, I’m Abhik https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhikpramanik/, 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!
[…]
change on day one.

You and I will do 30-day, 60-day, 90-day, and 6-month reviews to calibrate on our unique culture and how you, I, and the team will work together.

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.
• A minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, covered by Ashby. For folks outside the US, it may be longer to be in line with regional requirements.
• 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, 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’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.

Ashby is committed to a fair and transparent hiring process. We confirm that this advertisement is for an active, existing vacancy within our organization. Please be advised that we may use artificial intelligence-driven tools to assist our recruitment team in screening, assessing, and selecting candidates for this position.