Role Overview
As an Engineering Manager at Ashby, you will help build a different type of engineering team and culture. We are looking for a leader who is optimistic about what engineers can own and achieve. You will focus on building your team, developing their skills to thrive with ownership, and creating an environment that empowers them to do their best work with minimal distraction. You will manage a growing team of engineers in Europe, typically with around 6 direct reports, allowing you to stay hands-on while ensuring you are not on the critical path.
Responsibilities
- Provide feedback on product and technical specs to help engineers identify where to cut scope or improve quality.
- Grow engineers to the point where they can take large, loosely defined projects and deliver them with little intervention.
- Jump into systems and code to debug customer issues, ship small bug fixes, or improve developer experience.
- Improve internal processes, such as generating and simulating data in demo accounts, to keep up-to-date with the codebase while impacting the business.
- Think deeply about individual performance, process, and culture rather than running sprint planning or driving product decisions.
Company Context
Ashby is building high-standard tooling for Talent Acquisition (TA) teams, moving into areas like onboarding and performance management. We believe a small, talented team can build high-quality software fast while working regular hours. Our culture is defined by minimal process, high ownership, natural collaboration, and deliberate communication.
Benefits and Perks
- Competitive salary (£110K – £200K) and equity.
- 10-year exercise window for stock options.
- Unlimited PTO, with active encouragement to use it.
- Minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave.
- Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget.
- $100/month education budget, with larger items like conferences covered upon approval.
- $250/month tool budget plus access to AI tools like Claude, Cursor, and Codex.
- High-quality supplemental health insurance for you and your dependents, 100% covered by Ashby.
- Remote-first culture with in-person meetups at least twice a year and a budget for local team meetups.
What We Are Looking For
- You love being technical and can hold in-depth conversations with direct reports across infra, backend, and frontend.
- You enjoy management problems, including driving people to be their best, giving difficult feedback, and building systems to facilitate this.
- You hold your team to a high standard and provide detailed feedback.
- You are an excellent and empathetic communicator capable of facilitating change at individual and organizational levels.
- You have deep knowledge of what makes exceptional engineers, how to recruit them, and how to grow them.
- You are good at thinking about product, business, and design, but prefer building a team that makes decisions without you.
- You thrive in high-trust, high-autonomy environments.
- While we do not require previous experience in our specific stack, a love of typed languages is helpful. Our stack includes: TypeScript (frontend & backend), React, GraphQL API, Node.js, Postgres, Redis.
