Head of Platform & Infrastructure Engineering - Ashby

Ashby is growing fast, which means exponential growth across every product metric: jobs, applications, interviews, and more. Keeping Ashby performant and reliable is a primary company priority. We are seeking an Engineering leader to take ownership of performance, reliability, and team growth.

We have assembled a Platform & Infrastructure team of 11 engineers (all Senior+, >70% Staff) who have done an excellent job handling our growth to date. However, leadership has previously been diffused across Engineering leaders. As we hit our next scale phase, we are hiring a dedicated Head of Platform & Infrastructure Engineering reporting directly to the CTO.

The Role

In this role, your responsibilities will include:

• Building and maintaining a long-term vision and 6-month roadmap for Platform & Infrastructure.
• Growing the Platform & Infrastructure team: Hire ICs and managers, build out headcount plans, and evaluate specialized roles (e.g., Database Administrator).
• Fostering an excellent relationship with Product Engineering: Enable Product Engineering to move fast independently without compromising reliability, ensuring Platform & Infrastructure operates proactively.
• Improving monitoring and incident management: Enhance uptime measurements and coordinate effectively with Support during incidents.
• Managing critical vendor relationships: Oversee hosting and observability infrastructure contracts (AWS, ClickHouse, Datadog, Braintrust) to maintain gross margin efficiency.
• Managing managers: Hire and lead engineering managers; scale leadership structures across time zones.
• Developer Experience (DevEx): If you have experience in DevEx and developer tooling, build out a dedicated DevEx team (otherwise, DevEx will report into Product Engineering).

Qualifications

• High-growth leadership experience: You played a key leadership role (as an IC Lead or Engineering Manager) through rapid scaling, balancing short-term fixes with long-term infrastructure investments.
• Hiring & process building: Track record of designing interview loops, hiring strategies, and expanding engineering teams.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Demonstrated collaboration with Product, Engineering, Sales, and Support teams on company-level initiatives.
• Technical depth: Deep knowledge of platform and infrastructure technologies, networking, Kubernetes, pod load balancing, and cloud/hardware abstractions.
• Strong written communication: Ability to converse deeply with infrastructure engineers and clearly explain complex technical topics to executive stakeholders.
• Timezone location: Located within PST to GMT time zones to support a team spanning the Americas West Coast to Europe.

Why You Shouldn't Apply

• You have only worked as a line manager and have not led an entire engineering department or defined team culture.
• You do not enjoy staying up-to-date with code and technology.
• You entered management solely as a career growth alternative to IC tracks.
• You prefer heavy process, rigid sprint planning, or extensive guardrails over engineer autonomy and high ownership.
• You view Staff/Principal engineers primarily as project managers or architecture reviewers rather than technical leaders who lead by example.

Engineering Culture at Ashby

• Minimal Process & High Ownership: Engineers own projects end-to-end—from specs and wireframes to implementation and monitoring.
• Deliberate Communication: Focus time is protected, keeping meetings to under 2 hours per week for most engineers through high-async collaboration.