Principal Platform Engineer, EU

Ashby, Inc.; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 99,000 - 138,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading software company is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to optimize infrastructure and ensure high-quality hiring processes. The role involves working with a dynamic infrastructure team, optimizing tools, and leading projects end-to-end. Candidates should have strong SQL and infrastructure experience. The company offers competitive compensation, unlimited PTO, and a focus on developer satisfaction.

Benefits

Competitive salary

10-year exercise window for stock options

Unlimited PTO

Generous equipment budget

$100/month education budget

Top-tier health insurance

Qualifications

• Experience with infrastructure and software engineering.
• Strong understanding of SQL and database optimization.
• Familiarity with cloud-based infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Optimize dynamic SQL compiler and create helpful tools.
• Implement automated guardrails for customer data security.
• Work on defining SLOs with the business and engineering team.

Skills

Curiosity

Problem-solving

Infrastructure as code

SQL

TypeScript

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Node.js

React

Postgres

Redis

Datadog

Sentry

Job description

Principal Platform Engineer, EU @ Ashby

Join to apply for the Principal Platform Engineer, EU role at Ashby

5 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

We’re looking for a curious, rigorous, problem-hungry platform engineer (who codes!) to carry the ball as we bring Ashby to the big leagues. Ashby builds software that lets talent teams build an efficient, delightful, respectful hiring process. Similarly, you’re an engineer who wants to build a “paved road” that excellent engineering teams can safely take to the moon and back.

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, over 2500 customers, very low churn, and many years of runway. We’ll share more details once we meet, but you now probably have a good idea as to why we’re hiring for this role 😅.

We’ve listed this role twice: as a Platform Engineer and Site Reliability Engineer – our team does both, and we are open to candidates who lean towards one or the other.

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 infrastructure‑as‑code. 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.

Why You Should Apply

• 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 Shouldn’t 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. Our leads (and managers) give ample commentary and feedback on technical decisions but you ship what you want to build and are accountable for it.
• 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 – albeit at a platform level. Reviewing code and submitting 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 of what talented recruiters and hiring teams expected from TA software. We built and continue to build Ashby to give TA teams the highest standard of tooling. We want other functions and departments to be jealous of what TA teams can do with Ashby.

Engineering Culture

• 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

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, and we will encourage you to take it.
• 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.

Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.

Seniority Level

Mid‑Senior level

Employment Type

Full‑time

Job Function

Engineering and Information Technology

Industries

Software Development

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