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 company priority, and we need an experienced leader to scale our Platform & Infrastructure engineering function.

We have assembled a Platform & Infrastructure team of 11 engineers (all Senior+, >70% Staff). As we hit our next level of scale, we are hiring an Engineering leader responsible for performance, reliability, and building out the team to support our trajectory.

The Role

Reporting directly to the CTO, your responsibilities will include:

• Vision & Roadmap: Build and maintain a long-term vision and 6-month roadmap for Platform & Infrastructure.
• Team Growth: Hire ICs and managers, build out headcount plans, and determine specialized roles needed (e.g., Database Administrators).
• Product Engineering Alignment: Build and maintain an excellent working relationship with Product Engineering, ensuring rapid feature development without compromising performance or reliability.
• Monitoring & Incident Management: Assess and improve uptime measurement, incident response, and coordination with Support.
• Vendor & Cost Management: Maintain vendor relationships and negotiate pricing for critical hosting and observability infrastructure (AWS, ClickHouse, Datadog, Braintrust).
• Management of Managers: Directly manage and hire engineering managers. Within your first 6 months, you will likely hire a manager underneath you.
• DevEx (Optional): If you have experience managing developer experience and developer tools, build out a dedicated team for DevEx. Otherwise, DevEx will report into Product Engineering.

Qualifications

• High-Growth Leadership: Proven track record leading a company through a high-growth period (as an IC Lead or Engineering Leader), balancing short-term fixes with long-term infrastructure investments.
• Hiring Experience: Track record of designing interviews, loops, and leading hiring strategy for senior talent.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Demonstrated success collaborating with Product, Sales, and Support departments on company-wide initiatives.
• Technical Depth: Deep knowledge of platform and infrastructure technologies, networking, Kubernetes, load balancing, and cloud infrastructure hardware abstractions.
• Written Communication: Exceptional written communicator capable of technical deep dives with infrastructure engineers as well as high-level communication with executive leadership.
• Time Zone Availability: Comfortable managing a team spanning from the Americas West Coast to Europe. Candidates must reside within the PST to GMT time zones.

Why You Shouldn’t Apply

• You have only been a line manager and have never led an engineering department or shaped engineering culture.
• You do not enjoy staying up-to-date with technology or technical architecture.
• You went into management solely because it was the only available career path.
• You prefer rigid guardrails and processes over giving engineers strong autonomy and ownership.
• You view Staff and Principal Engineers primarily as project managers or architectural review boards rather than IC force multipliers.
• You believe engineering scale requires traditional status-quo processes like heavy sprint planning or exhaustive PM specs.

Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture relies on minimal process, high ownership, deliberate written communication, and strong focus time. Product managers share problem briefs, and engineers own projects end-to-end—from research and specs to implementation and delivery.