Engineering Manager, EU

Ashby; Roma; In loco; EUR 70.000 - 90.000; Tempo pieno

Descrizione del lavoro

A leading technology firm in Rome is seeking an Engineering Manager to enhance an innovative engineering culture. This role entails managing a growing team, providing feedback on specifications, and cultivating ownership in projects. The ideal candidate has a strong technical background and enjoys fostering team development in a high-autonomy environment. Competitive salary and benefits are offered.

Servizi

Competitive salary and equity

Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended

Generous equipment budget

$100/month education budget

Competenze

• You love being technical and can hold in-depth conversations with direct reports.
• You enjoy management problems and get excited about driving people to be their best.
• You're good at thinking about product, business, and design without calling the shots.

Mansioni

• Provide feedback on product and technical specs.
• Grow engineers to take large projects, delivering with little intervention.
• Debug a customer issue or ship a small bug fix.

Conoscenze

Technical expertise

Empathetic communication

Management problems

High-trust environments

Descrizione del lavoro

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 driven 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

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 a good fit if

• 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.

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 😅.
• 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.

Interview Process

• Intro Call (30m) – Discuss your application questions, align on the responsibilities of the role, and answer questions about Ashby.
• Past Experience Deep Dive (1h) – Discuss your past experience as an engineering leader.
• Technical Screen (1h) – 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 (1h) – Spend time with our VP of Engineering and get to know each other.
• Meet the team (2h) – 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’re building

Talent teams aspire to build a hiring process that identifies great candidates, moves them quickly through the interview process, and provides an excellent experience for the candidate. To accomplish this, recruiters perform thousands of daily tasks to coordinate and relay information between candidates, interviewers, and hiring managers. Scheduling a final round is an excellent example of our customers’ challenges. A recruiter needs to collect availability from the candidate, identify potential interviewers, perform “Calendar Tetris” to find who is available to interview the candidate, schedule on the earliest date possible, and perform any last‑minute adjustments as availability changes. They must perform this while considering the interview load on each individual and whether interviewers need to be trained and shadowing others.

Ashby provides talent teams with 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 put a lot of effort into designing products that are approachable to beginners but mastered and extended by power users. In many ways, spreadsheets set the bar here.

We have many customers, great revenue growth, years of runway, and amazing investors like YCombinator, Elad Gil, and Lachy Groom. I’ll share more once we meet.

Ashby’s success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. We’re being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. I hope that excites you enough 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.