Senior Product Engineer, Canada

Ashby; Canada; Remote; CAD 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

A dynamic tech startup in Canada is seeking a Product Engineer who will take ownership of features from concept to implementation. The ideal candidate is expected to tackle tasks across the technology stack, embrace innovation, and thrive in an environment that values collaboration and minimal process. If you have the ability to navigate ambiguity and are eager to make a meaningful impact, this opportunity could be for you.

Benefits

Unlimited PTO

Competitive salary and equity

12 weeks fully paid parental leave

Education budget

Health insurance coverage

Qualifications

• You should be comfortable with both frontend and backend tasks.
• Experience with product-oriented projects involving ambiguity is essential.
• Strong communication skills are required for collaboration across teams.

Responsibilities

• Take ownership of product features and projects end-to-end.
• Design and implement solutions to complex problems.
• Work collaboratively with stakeholders to gather requirements.

Skills

Frontend development

Backend development

Collaboration

Problem-solving

Tools

TypeScript

React

Node.js

Postgres

Job description

Overview

Hi I’m Abhik, Ashby’s Co-Founder and VP of Engineering. We’re looking for a versatile, persistent product engineer who’s not afraid to set up reusable building blocks across the stack and advocate for the time and space to do so. At Ashby, all our engineers ship features end-to-end at a high pace. If that speaks to you, read on.

About Ashby

What Ashby gives you in return is the best of both early and growth-stage environments. The agency and no-nonsense of a seed startup: you write product specs, make product and design decisions, and build in an almost-no-meeting culture. While also the product-market fit and scale of a growth-stage startup: tens of thousands of daily users who depend on your software and eagerly await your next feature.

We have notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. Our growth and retention metrics are best-in-class among our peers: tens of millions in ARR, growing >100% year over year, very low churn, and many years of runway. We’ll share more details once we meet.

You’ve probably seen this role posted before, and it’s because we’re always expanding the team (we’re on track to double this year). We’re bubbling with ideas on how to support Talent Acquisition through software, and we’ve started the journey of building products beyond Talent Acquisition. We read every application and aim to respond to yours within 3-4 days (often sooner).

About the Role and How We Work

Our engineering culture strives to recreate the environments where we did our best work as ICs – where we had the ownership and agency to impact our users with creative and innovative software.

I started my career building software for artists in the Visual Effects industry. It was a formative experience for me as a software engineer because success relied on my ability to be a product manager and designer. I talked to artists to understand their needs. I came up with ideas. I did industry research, designed interfaces, and prototyped ideas. I watched artists use what I built and decided what to tackle in the next iteration. No daily stand-ups, no t-shirt sizing, no planning meetings.

I studied computer science to solve problems, not tickets, and this felt exactly like that. I not only felt creative and fulfilled but the agency and ownership we were given as engineers powered an incredible amount of innovation.

Innovation came differently (or not at all) at technology startups beyond the seed stage, often through an engineer’s force of will and ability to push back against culture (rather than any encouragement from it). Engineering was narrowed to implementation and delivery, partly due to the influence of other departments and partly due to the influx of Agile processes like sprint planning. In those companies, I felt like a JIRA jockey.

At Ashby, we’re building an environment that is optimistic about what engineers can own and achieve. An environment that embraces innovative engineers, and, frankly, often stays out of their way. As a Product Engineer, you’ll take ownership over a large portion of one of our products and own projects end-to-end (wearing hats traditionally worn by product and design). You’ll research competitors, write product specs, make wireframes, and more. To ground it with examples, product engineers at Ashby have:

• Designed and built automated interview scheduling. This feature automates scheduling by calculating possible times from a pool of interviewers and other constraints, and then presenting these times to the candidate for selection via our responsive web app. This solves the “Calendar Tetris” problem.
• Built a generalized declarative filter architecture that allows users to create complex filters for any record with a consistent UI and compile it to SQL in our backend. Many user-facing features use it.
• Speced, designed, and implemented a feature that allows users to complete signing offers entirely within Ashby. This project involved talking to customers to understand their requirements, deciding what technologies to use, building a prototype, and working with other team members to integrate the final implementation into additional features.

What We’re Building

As engineers, we are used to tooling that makes us better at what we do. When we started Ashby, we saw the opposite with Talent Acquisition software. Scheduling a final round is an excellent example. Recruiting teams wanted to schedule candidates faster, track interviewer preparation and quality, and do it with half the headcount. A recruiter needed to manually collect availability, identify qualified interviewers, perform Calendar Tetris, schedule on the earliest date possible, and make any last-minute adjustments as availability changed. They must do this while considering the interview load on each individual and whether interviewers need to be trained and shadowing others.

As hiring managers, we know TA is a critical function, and as engineers, we know software can do better. So, we built and continue to build Ashby to give TA teams the highest standard of tooling. Software that’s intelligent and powerful. Software that provides insights into where they’re failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they’re underwater with. We want other functions and departments to be jealous of what TA teams can do with Ashby, and today they often are!

Why You Should or Shouldn’t Apply

Software engineers come in many flavors, not all of which fit our model. Here are some things to help you decide if this fits you and what you’re looking for:

• You’re not afraid to tackle any part of a technology stack. You do what’s necessary to successfully deliver a feature, whether writing frontend or choosing new infrastructure. We’ll provide a supportive environment to do it successfully (e.g., design system, SRE team).
• You’ve tackled projects with a lot of product and technical ambiguity, and you thrive at the intersection of the two. We’re not building a simple CRUD app, and many of the challenges we tackle require you to use your knowledge of our customers to build powerful abstractions and flexibility in the system to solve a class of problems.
• You know how to strike the right balance between speed and quality. Ashby wasn’t built quickly. We took four years to launch publicly because convincing customers to switch required a high-quality product. However, time isn’t infinite, especially for a startup, so we still move with urgency—we’ve built the equivalent of three or more VC-backed startups with a very small team.
• You are ambitious and always looking to improve your skills. For most engineers, this role will give you more freedom and responsibilities than you’ve experienced in the past. To thrive (and level up), you’ll need to be open to feedback (and we give lots of it).
• You’re an excellent collaborator and communicator. Ownership and freedom don’t mean you work in a vacuum. You’ll need to vet your decisions with the appropriate stakeholders, keep them up to date when necessary, and work with other engineers to get your projects across the finish line. Clear and concise communication helps a lot here!
• You seek to create leverage in your work. The nature of software is that you can often automate or abstract what would be tedious, time-consuming work. Your impatience usually leads to new abstractions, tools to allow Support to debug before Engineering, new lint rules to prevent common bugs, etc.

Put another way, you shouldn’t apply if:

• You’re not comfortable with a role where a tech lead, staff, or principal engineer may spend time on architecture reviews while engineers primarily build. Our most tenured engineers spend most of their time building, and mentorship is limited.
• You need company-driven process and structure to get projects across the finish line. You’d rather focus on technical details and challenges.
• You only want to do exciting work. We’re building a team of kind, collaborative folks with distributed customer issues and investigations.
• You can get lost in the details. You like everything planned upfront.
• You haven’t led or taken ownership of projects before.
• You want to mentor earlier-career engineers.

Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture is motivated by the belief that a small, talented team can build high-quality software fast and work regular hours. We do it through:

• 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

Minimal Process & Lots of Ownership

The best engineers deliver reliably magical outcomes with minimal oversight while stakeholders are never in the dark. Engineers take on problems end-to-end, with product managers and designers providing strategy and problem briefs.

Ashby emphasizes ownership over process and believes engineers should drive information outward and pull in teammates as needed. Not every engineer will thrive, but those who do thrive here.

Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate

Our team consists of lifelong learners who are talented, humble, and kind. We emphasize collaboration, research, prototyping, and written proposals to see around corners and get feedback across time zones. We hold focus time sacred and aim for limited meetings.

We meet in person at least twice a year and provide a budget for regional meetups.

Increase Leverage, not Team Size

We’ve built Ashby with quality and depth through investment in:

• Great developer tooling. CI/CD runs in ~10 minutes and we deploy at least 15x a day. A debugger works out of the box, and every team member contributes to the developer experience.
• Building blocks to create powerful products fast. A core set of common components (analytics modeling, query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) that improve across the app.

Here’s an impromptu quote from Arjun in our company Slack about building a feature at Ashby and a demo of one of these building blocks.

Put Effort into Diversity

Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Today, 21% of engineers at Ashby are from underrepresented groups. We are taking steps to improve, such as sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, no leetcode interviews, and more.

Interview Process

We want to help you show your best self. We’ll dive into past projects and simulate collaboration through pair programming, writing product and tech specs collaboratively, and discussing decisions. There are no leetcode or whiteboard exercises. The interview process is three rounds:

1. Introduction call with Hiring Manager (15 to 30 minutes, live)
2. A technical screen where we pair in our actual codebase (1 hour, live)
3. Three non-coding interviews focusing on product thinking, technical design, and infrastructure (3 hours 15 minutes, live, can be split across days)

Depending on leadership bandwidth, we may start with an additional 30-minute screen with a recruiter. Your hiring manager will be your main point of contact and will prep you for interviews. Each round will have written guidance. You’ll meet 4 to 6 people in engineering and have 5–15 minutes to ask questions. If we don’t give an offer, we’ll provide feedback.

Your First Three Months at Ashby

We want an exceptional onboarding experience. Your dev environment is set up with a single script, you push your first product change on day one, and you ship changes that gradually increase in scope. Your manager will conduct 30, 60, and 90-day reviews to calibrate on how we work together.

You’ll have a peer to pair with and help answer questions, with training sessions on our culture, product, engineering process, and technical architecture.

Technology Stack

We use a stack including TypeScript (frontend & backend), React, GraphQL API, Node.js, Postgres, Redis. Previous experience in these is not required, but a love of typed languages helps. Some engineers have switched from languages like Swift and Kotlin and platforms like iOS or Windows. What matters is fundamentals and ability to learn fast.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.
• 10-year exercise window for stock options. You shouldn’t feel pressure to purchase stock options if you leave.
• Unlimited PTO and encouragement to use it.
• Minimum 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, with regional adjustments as needed.
• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget.
• $100/month education budget with manager approval for more expensive items.
• Health insurance: US-based employees receive top-tier coverage with premiums covered by Ashby; in other countries, high-quality supplemental coverage.

Ashby’s success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, challenged, and do our best work. We’re building that environment from the ground up, and we hope you’re excited to apply.

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.