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).

Doing this requires a broader set of skills in individual engineers. Technical and product management skills blended with customer empathy and business context. Finding and growing people with such a broad set of skills is a challenge, it’s also deeply fulfilling.

To accomplish this, our engineering leaders need to think deeply about process, culture, and individual performance - 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.

This role is heavily focused on growing engineers. For example, many managers view themselves as working to unblock engineers. We view that managers should be coaching engineers on how to unblock themselves.

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.

We try to stay within 10 direct reports for each engineering manager to spend time with our teams observing, correcting, praising, and, yes, coding – opening this role is part of our commitment to this paced growth.

In Addition To Working With Engineers You’ll Also Get To Work On Projects Yourselves. Some Examples Of Work Our Engineering Leaders Have Done

• 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.
• Rethink how we (and the industry) do pull request reviews by aligning on goals with the team, sampling a set of PRs to understand how effective they are, and writing a proposal to the team about what we could change to speed up reviews while giving reviewers the time and space to give useful feedback.
• Design and improve interview tracks based on candidate and team feedback. We pride ourselves on having thoughtful interviews that simulate actually working with us!
• 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.

Why You Should or Shouldn’t Apply

Engineering Leadership Comes In Many Flavors, Not All Of Which Fit Our Model. I Thought I’d Outline Some Things I’m Looking For To Help You Decide If This Fits What You’re Looking For

• You are technical and can hold in-depth conversations with direct reports from infra to backend to frontend.
• 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 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’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 think engineering culture and process could use improvement, and you’ve tried or successfully implemented something that sheds the status quo in pursuit of something better.
• 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.

Put Another Way, You Shouldn’t Apply If

• You don’t enjoy coding or don’t find time to stay up-to-date on technology.
• 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.