Engineering Manager, EU

Join to apply for the Engineering Manager, EU role at Ashby 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

Hi

I’m Colin, Director of Engineering, Europe. How do you feel about engineers writing product specs, making product decisions, and not breaking down projects into individual tickets? If that sounds exciting (even if a bit scary), read on because I’m looking for an engineering manager to help us build a different type of engineering team and culture at Ashby. To start, why do we need to be different? Time and again, I have witnessed engineers knowing what needs to be done yet being unable to get things done because of “the process” or because “more data is needed.” Some of the most effective projects have been skunkworks projects, where engineers have taken total ownership of a problem and delivered it to completion. I want to normalize that at Ashby. When we think about how these processes came about, we realize they carry a pessimistic mindset. They box people into smaller roles to minimize the chance of not meeting a certain standard. At Ashby we’re building an environment that is optimistic about what engineers can own and achieve and embraces the innovative engineers (and frankly, often stays out of their way). To accomplish this, our engineering leaders need to think deeply about individual performance, process, and culture—not running sprint planning or driving product and technical decisions. You’ll focus on building your team, their skills to thrive with the ownership they’re given, and an environment that empowers them to do their best work consistently, with little distraction. For junior EMs we try to stay within 6 direct reports. This enables them to spend time with our teams observing, correcting, praising, and, yes, coding. We like our managers to be hands‑on while also making sure they’re not on the critical path. We’ve already gathered an experienced, talented, and collaborative team of 25+ engineers. You’ll help me manage the growing team of engineers in Europe. Examples of work our engineering leaders have done

Provide 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. They still ask for help when needed—the difference is that they’re driving. 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). 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. Why be a manager?

I had two experiences early in my career that set me on my path. I had a great manager who asked tonnes of questions about the decisions I was making and coached me without me realizing it. And I had a terrible manager—being told to work harder after a week of 3am finishes was not what I needed as a young engineer. The stark difference between these two experiences motivated me to become a manager: I wanted every engineer I worked with to have the support I had in the best case. Since then, as I’ve learned more, I’ve realized that I love the kind of problems I get to solve as a manager. Deeply complex problems with long‑term impact both on the company and on people’s lives. One of my proudest achievements is creating a fully transparent pay system, and on the day it was revealed, everybody was happy with it. Nobody stormed out. By spending time thinking deeply about everybody’s pay and ensuring the mechanics of promotion were clear, I put the team in a place where they could see a peer was paid more than them, and it not be a problem. Despite all this, I love being technical. I sometimes indulge myself and spend a morning writing some code to improve tests or provide better abstractions. If I couldn’t be a manager, I’d be super happy to be an IC. I’m looking for someone who is passionate. Passionate about both management and being technical. Someone who spots a pattern amongst their team, figures out a better way for us to operate, and then builds the automation that powers it. I introduced a new process that enables engineers to merge 30% of PRs without a human review beforehand. I also built the automation that approves these PRs. I also built that automation with abstractions that make it easy for the engineers to improve the automation themselves. It can be hard to find seasoned engineering leaders who haven’t succumbed to the status quo in some way or another. We're committed to giving all our people a total and utter lack of terrible managers, and that means we're willing to take a chance on someone early in their leadership journey who's courageous, principled, and has the drive to build themselves into a great leader who can say “Yah I know everyone is doing that, but we won't because...” Qualifications

You love being technical and can hold in‑depth conversations with direct reports from infra to backend to frontend. You enjoy management problems. We want people who get excited about driving people to be their best, giving difficult feedback, and building systems that make this easier. You hold your team to a high standard and don’t shy away from getting into the details and giving feedback, even to the best folks on your team. You are an excellent and empathetic communicator. Facilitating change at both an individual and organization level requires understanding how to navigate the beliefs, opinions, and past experiences of engineers and figuring out how to both convince them of a new way of doing things while also leaving yourself open to feedback. You know what exceptional engineers look like. You’ve thought deeply about what makes them tick, how to recruit them, and how to grow folks into them. I want to see depth here, the industry often regurgitates a vanilla description, but the reality is more nuanced. You’re good at thinking about product, business, and maybe even design, but you’re not interested in calling the shots and are more interested in building a team that can make the best decisions without you. You thrive in high‑trust, high‑autonomy environments. We're a young startup where leaders wear multiple hats, and you'll build your own (high‑speed) on‑ramp through developing strong feedback loops. Not for you

You don’t enjoy coding or don’t find time to stay up‑to‑date on technology. You’ve gotten into management because it was the only growth path available. You want to make all the product decisions instead of empowering your team to make those calls. You're happy with a team of engineers that are predominantly early‑career, mid‑career, or don't thrive with ownership or autonomy. With enough guardrails, the team can get things done. A staff or principal engineer to you is someone who spends most of their time project managing or doing architecture reviews. You’re not optimistic or convinced that we can build a large engineering team that functions differently than 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. Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture is motivated by Abhik and Benji’s (our co‑founders) belief that a small talented team, given the right environment, can build high‑quality software fast (and work regular hours!). Collaboration is Natural, Communication is Deliberate. Our engineering team (and the team at large) consists of lifelong learners who are humble and kind (meet them here!). These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally (we filter for it in interviews). We combine this with 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 can focus 36 h out of a 40 h work week (Abhik wrote about it here). Even managers can rely on getting consistent time (and support to make, if necessary) to focus and do creative work without the demand of constant meetings. Interview Process

At Ashby, Our Team And Interview Process Want To Help You Show Your Best Self. We’ll Dive Into Past Projects And Simulate Working Together. Our Interview Process Is Six Interviews In The Following Order: Intro Call (30 min) – Discuss your application questions, align on the responsibilities of the role, and answer questions about Ashby. Past Experience Deep Dive (1 h) – Discuss your past experience as an engineering leader. Technical Screen (1 h) – Add a feature back to Ashby. You'll spend most of your time understanding a specific part of our codebase and write less than 15 lines of code. Coffee Chat with VP of Engineering (1 h) – Spend time with our VP of Engineering and get to know each other. Meet the Team (2 h) – At this point, the engineering leadership team is excited about you and you'll meet our CEO, Engineers, Product Managers, and some other folks on the team. Technology Stack

TypeScript (frontend & backend), Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, Redis. We don’t require previous experience. Benefits