Software Engineering Manager, Americas

Ashby • San Francisco, CA

57d

About The Position

Hi 👋🏾, I’m Abhik, Ashby’s Co-Founder and VP of Engineering. We’re looking for a great (former) engineer who built impressive products and now builds teams of great engineers. Ashby’s success and ambition mean we’re doubling the Engineering team in the next year, and we need your experience and leadership to do it thoughtfully.
Our product and growth are exceptional. Ashby All-in-One is powerful, easy to use, and replaces several venture-backed companies' worth of products (often with a better experience). We have notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. Our growth and retention metrics are best-in-class among our peers: we have tens of millions in ARR, growing >100% year over year, very low churn, and many years of runway.
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, figure out how to hire them, and build an environment that gives them the freedom and agency to actually be exceptional. In other words, if engineers writing product specs, making product decisions, and not breaking down projects into individual tickets excites you, you’ve found the right place.
As an Engineering Manager, you’ll work closely with me, Colin, and your peers to build out the team and continue scaling this unique culture.
You’ll first do that through grassroots leadership. You’ll manage three to five Engineers and hire three to five more. They’ll cover multiple teams and a variety of specializations, from Product Engineers to Site Reliability Engineers to Design Engineers.

Requirements

• You don’t enjoy coding or don’t find time to stay up-to-date on technology. We believe great leaders are folks who were great engineers themselves. That starts with loving the craft and never giving it up.
• You follow the rules and accept the hand you’ve been dealt. We want folks with the ambition, courage, and follow-through to change things, whether it’s within their own team or across departments.
• You went into management because it was the only growth path available. We want folks who could have been Principal engineers (or were one!).
• You're happy with a team of engineers who are predominantly early-career or mid-career or don't thrive with ownership or autonomy. You believe that with enough guardrails, the team can get things done.
• To you, a Staff or Principal Engineer is someone who spends most of their time project managing or conducting architecture reviews. You don’t believe staff and principal engineers could lead by the example they set or the leverage they create through their work.
• You’re not optimistic or convinced that we can build a large engineering team that functions differently from the status quo. You think, at some size, common processes need to be implemented to ensure consistent product delivery (e.g., sprint planning, product managers writing in-depth specifications). You might not say it out loud, but you think, at some size, compromises have to be made for the sake of hiring numbers or consistency.

Responsibilities

• Providing feedback on product and technical specs to help engineers identify where to cut scope or improve quality. You don’t make the final decisions, but you’ll influence and coach ICs to reach the right ones.
• Grow engineers to the point where they can take large, loosely defined projects and deliver them with little intervention.
• Jump into our systems and code to debug a customer issue, ship a small bug fix, or improve our developer experience. Engineering leaders at Ashby are great engineers and enjoy keeping their skills up-to-date (while staying off the critical path).
• Rethink how we (and the industry) do pull request reviews by aligning on goals with the team, sampling a set of PRs to understand how effective they are, and writing a proposal to the team about what we could change to speed up reviews while giving reviewers the time and space to give useful feedback.
• Design and improve interviews based on candidate and team feedback. We pride ourselves on thoughtful interviews that simulate actually working with us!
• Improve how we generate and simulate data in demo accounts. It’s a project off the critical path, but it helps you keep up-to-date on our codebase while immensely impacting the business, from Engineering to QA to Sales.

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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 101-250 employees