Role Overview
As an Engineering Manager at Ashby, you will help build a different type of engineering team and culture. We are looking for leaders who think deeply about individual performance, process, and culture, rather than just running sprint planning or driving product decisions. 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.
Responsibilities
- Team Leadership: Manage a growing team of engineers in Europe, typically with around 6 direct reports, allowing you to observe, coach, and remain hands-on.
- Product & Technical Influence: Provide feedback on product and technical specs to help engineers identify where to cut scope or improve quality. You will influence and coach individual contributors to reach the right decisions.
- Growth & Mentorship: Grow engineers to the point where they can take large, loosely defined projects and deliver them with little intervention.
- Hands-on Contribution: Jump into systems and code to debug customer issues, ship small bug fixes, or improve developer experience. You will keep your skills up-to-date while staying off the critical path.
- Process Improvement: Identify patterns in team operations and build automation to improve efficiency, such as tools for PR reviews or data simulation.
Company Culture
Ashby is building an environment that is optimistic about what engineers can own and achieve. We believe in minimal process, high ownership, and deliberate communication. We prioritize focus time, with engineers typically spending less than 2 hours in meetings per week. We are committed to diversity, with 25% of our engineers and 50% of our engineering leaders coming from underrepresented groups.
Benefits and Perks
- Competitive salary and equity.
- 10-year exercise window for stock options.
- Unlimited PTO, with active encouragement to take it.
- A 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 (Claude, Cursor, Codex) with generous token budgets.
- High-quality supplemental health insurance for you and your dependents, 100% covered by Ashby.
- Regular in-person meetups (departmental and company-wide) plus a budget for local team meetups.
What We Are Looking For
- Technical Depth: You love being technical and can hold in-depth conversations with direct reports across infrastructure, backend, and frontend.
- Passion for Management: You enjoy solving complex management problems, such as driving people to be their best, giving difficult feedback, and building systems to facilitate growth.
- High Standards: You hold your team to a high standard and are comfortable getting into details to provide constructive feedback.
- Communication Skills: You are an excellent and empathetic communicator capable of facilitating change and navigating different perspectives.
- Leadership Experience: You understand what exceptional engineers look like, how to recruit them, and how to grow them.
- Product & Business Acumen: You are capable of thinking about product and business strategy but prefer building a team that can make these decisions independently.
- Autonomy: You thrive in high-trust, high-autonomy environments.
Tech Stack
While we do not require previous experience in our specific stack, a love for typed languages is helpful. Our stack includes: * TypeScript (frontend & backend) * React * GraphQL API * Node.js * Postgres * Redis
