Engineering Manager - UK

Ashby; City of Edinburgh; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

10-year stock options window

Unlimited PTO

Equipment budget

Education budget

Job summary

Ashby is seeking a registered Engineering Manager to help us build a different type of engineering team and culture in Europe. You will focus on building and developing your team, enabling them to own large, loosely defined projects.

Our team values ownership and autonomy, minimal process overhead, and strong technical leadership. This role emphasizes recruiting and growing exceptional engineers, plus fostering empathetic communication across levels and disciplines.

Qualifications

• Strong leader capable of growing and developing engineers.
• Experience recruiting and growing exceptional software engineers.
• Fluency in infra, backend, and frontend conversations and decisions.

Responsibilities

• Build and develop the engineering team to own large, loosely defined projects from end to end.
• Provide feedback on product and technical specs to help scope and quality decisions.
• Lead by example to foster ownership and autonomy with minimal process overhead.
• Help debug issues, ship fixes, and improve developer experience across teams.

Skills

Technical leadership

Recruiting

Cross-stack knowledge

Empathetic communication

Job description

Hi I'm Colin, Director of Engineering, Europe. How do you feel about software engineers writing product specs, making product decisions, and not breaking down projects into individual tickets? If that sounds exciting, read on because I’m looking for an engineering manager to help us build a different type of engineering team and culture at Ashby.

Our team at Ashby is built around ownership and autonomy. We allow engineers to take end‑to‑end projects and drive them to completion without excessive process overhead. In this role you will focus on building and developing your team, enabling them to own large, loosely defined projects.

What You'll Do

• Provide feedback on product and technical specs to help engineers identify where to cut scope or improve quality.
• Grow engineers so 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.
• Improve how we generate and simulate data in demo accounts, impacting engineering, QA and sales pipelines.

Desired Qualities

• You love being technical and can hold in-depth conversations across infra, backend, and frontend.
• You enjoy management problems and driving people to be their best.
• You hold your team to a high standard and give constructive feedback.
• You are an excellent, empathetic communicator and can facilitate change at both individual and organizational levels.
• You know what exceptional engineers look like and have experience recruiting and growing them.
• You thrive in high‑trust, high‑autonomy environments and prefer to let your team make decisions.
• You’re comfortable with a mix of senior and early‑career engineers.

Traits That Make You a Poor Fit

• You don’t enjoy coding or keep up to date with technology.
• You entered management because it was the only path for growth.
• You want to make all product decisions rather than empower your team.
• You are satisfied with a team that is predominantly early‑career or mid‑career and does not thrive with ownership.
• You plan to enforce strict processes such as sprint planning or mandatory detailed specifications at larger team sizes.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.
• 10‑year exercise window for stock options.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget.
• $100/month education budget.

Technology stack: TypeScript, Node.js, React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, Redis. Previous experience is not required.

Compensation Range: £110K – £200K

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.

Ashby is committed to a fair and transparent hiring process. We confirm that this advertisement is for an active, existing vacancy within our organization. Please be advised that we may use artificial intelligence‑driven tools to assist our recruitment team in screening, assessing, and selecting candidates for this position.