Principal Platform Engineer, Americas

2 days ago Be among the first 25 applicants This range is provided by Ashby. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more. Base Pay Range $202,000.00/yr - $330,000.00/yr About the Role And How We Work Hi I’m Colin, Head of EMEA Engineering. I’ve spent a number of years leading engineering teams in startups, and that has always included being close to infrastructure teams - no matter what name they’ve worn (SRE, infrastructure, platform, etc). I’ve got my hands dirty building the initial infrastructure for startups and know the value a talented infrastructure engineer brings. The rigour, the discipline, the peace and quiet when everything just hums along. Our infrastructure is in a good place for now. Nothing is static. Ashby continues to grow rapidly, putting strain on our existing infrastructure. We’re always looking to give our customers more powerful hiring software, and building new product features often requires new pieces of infrastructure. Having herded plenty of snowflake servers in the past, I’ve learned there’s a better way. I (and Ashby) place a lot of value on code‑as‑infrastructure. As a Platform Engineer at Ashby, you’ll get to dive into scaling problems, add new capabilities to our platform, and think about how our entire team interacts with infrastructure. All our own engineers own their projects end‑to‑end and ship with minimal oversight. We don’t put roadblocks to ensure security when common sense will do and we don’t build processes like change‑management boards around the lowest common denominator. But with great power comes great responsibility: we handle personal and confidential data about some of the biggest decisions we ever make at work. As we grow, more and bigger customers rely on us to be reliable and secure and how we operate internally will need to evolve. We’re at an inflection point where our ability to scale and deliver a seamless experience has a make‑or‑break impact – we have some of the fastest growing companies using our platform every day to hire hundreds of people per month. We need someone like you to make good decisions, debug thorny issues, and build us a future‑proof platform that can withstand this scale. Our small but mighty infrastructure team has set up a secure and simple environment (we don’t believe in spinning up a new service unless necessary) for our growing product team to build in. That’s where you come in: you, too, will own projects end‑to‑end and have an impact on core parts of the Ashby developer and user experience. For instance, you could work on: Optimize our homegrown ultra‑dynamic recruiting DSL‑to‑SQL compiler, and create tools to help developers do so Create automated guardrails for the security and privacy of our customer data Help our developers ship features fast through canary deploys, gradual rollouts and feature flags, while keeping complexity manageable and reducing downtime Work with the business and the engineering team to define SLOs and implement the corresponding SLIs Ensure all communication with external services supports retries and circuit‑breakers Implement the infrastructure to support an event‑driven architecture and data warehouse We’re looking for someone who can build systems that an engineer would like to work with: mature and boring but open‑minded and approachable. We have to balance reliability with flexibility. Software and its availability are now mission critical to almost every working professional. To be in an SRE in today’s world, you have to be extremely comfortable evaluating risk, those you take and those others take. You Should Apply If You never stop. You get weirdly obsessed about a problem that doesn’t yet make sense, turn it every which way in your head until the explanation dawns. You’ll search every rock, inventory every clue, hunt every mismatch. We do that, too – together we’ll be armed with state‑of‑the‑art monitoring tools and an impressive amount of data, and join you in the adventure. You don’t take shortcuts. You’re speaking up for the future user, the edge case, the doomsday design. You know product engineers want to build it with you, and see them as allies, where you give them the power and knowledge to access greater things. You’re someone who cares about what you do and the team you do it with, and want to work with others who do as well. You’ll be on interview panels choosing your next colleagues, and you’ll take that seriously. You only want to work with people who make you better, and want to make you better. You’ve built infrastructure at a slightly later stage than Ashby is at – you know how to deal with millions of data points, have seen great (or not great) infrastructure make or break customer experience, and have automated everything from provisioning to monitoring and release process. You’re a Swiss army knife (all nationalities welcome). You’ll get every hard problem the company faces. You’ll get to do infrastructure updates, security enforcements, database optimization, Kubernetes debugging, and digging through Typescript traces figuring out what doesn’t work. You probably don’t feel like an expert at at least some of that… and that appeals to you. You Should Not Apply If You don’t want to make your own decisions on what is the best paved road to build for Ashby, and expect a lead or manager to make the final call on what that is. You hate SQL. We have a lot of features built around making the best out of data, and our platform engineers also sometimes dive into a gnarly report or advise engineers on a more performant data model to use. You don’t want to code. Our SREs are some of our best software engineers and they are just as responsible for the application as the other engineering teams – they review code and submit code changes will be part of your day‑to‑day. Your primary mode of communicating best practices to engineers is live meetings. We’re a very async culture and written communication (and code) is how changes get made. As an Ashby SRE, you will need to share new tooling and best practices with engineers faster than your next meeting opportunity will take you. You’ve never delivered a project, on your own, without someone prodding you for updates. We have no project or delivery managers to fill your calendar with busy work, but the flip side is you have to do your project management, seek the help you need to get unstuck and cut scope when it’s worthwhile. Technology Stack TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, Redis. We use Datadog and Sentry on 100% cloud‑based (AWS) infra. We take developer experience and reliability seriously: all engineers are on call in a follow‑the‑sun model, and everyone contributes to developer tooling. 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. We built and continue to build Ashby to give TA teams the highest standard of tooling. 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. We want other functions and departments to be jealous of what TA teams can do with Ashby, and today they often are Engineering Culture Our Engineering Culture Is Motivated By Co‑founders’ 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 Collaboration & Communication 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 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