Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Summary

Join Ashby as a Site Reliability Engineer and build a robust and scalable platform for our rapidly growing customer base. You will play a crucial role in ensuring the reliability and security of our software, working on projects ranging from optimizing our recruiting DSL-to-SQL compiler to implementing an event-driven architecture. You will collaborate closely with product engineers, defining SLOs and implementing SLIs to maintain high performance and minimal downtime. This role requires a deep understanding of infrastructure, a passion for problem-solving, and a commitment to building high-quality, reliable systems. You will own projects end-to-end and have a significant impact on the developer and user experience. Ashby offers a unique opportunity to work with a talented team in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.

Requirements

• 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

Responsibilities

• 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

Preferred Qualifications

• 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 and how they’re made, 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

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 with four weeks recommended per year. Expect “Vacation?” in our one-on-one agenda until you start taking it 😅
• Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US. We plan to expand this to employees in other countries as situations arise
• 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, top-notch health insurance for you and your dependents with all premiums covered by us