Senior Backend Engineer, API and Integrations Platform

4 weeks ago

San Francisco, California, United States Ashby (YC W19) Full time

We're looking for a talented backend engineer who wants to drive the future of Ashby's API and Integrations Platform. Our product serves as a system of record for our customers. Ashby's API is a foundation for other companies and entrepreneurs to build successful products and businesses. You will play a crucial role in improving our API's flexibility, ease of use, and security to rival the quality of gold-standard APIs like Figma's and Stripe's. You'll also build abstractions to help us quickly build integrations with other core systems like Google Workspace and Workday. These responsibilities require creativity, empathy, and serious architectural skill, so prepare for a challenge.

I'm Abhik, Ashby's Co-Founder and VP of Engineering. I've led API teams at several companies and seen firsthand that the quality of a product's API and integrations significantly impacts its business. In fact, at a previous company, I estimated that we lost 25% of potential customers because we didn't have the integrations to connect our product to the rest of a customer's technology stack. I lobbied leadership to create an API and integrations team and became its Product Manager. The engineer in me took pride in how our API was designed, the quality of our documentation, and being responsive to developer feedback. It resulted in a rich partner ecosystem that won us a lot of business and continues to flourish today.

At Ashby, we're taking the same approach and have thought deeply about our API from day one (you can find an interview with our first engineer, Aaron Norby, about some of our design decisions here). As a result, the industry noticed. In just two years since our public launch, we've added over 100 integrations, and our partners love our API so much that they develop features for Ashby ahead of competitors:

We're bringing you in to continue expanding our API's functionality and versatility. For instance, other engineers on this team have:

Created a generic assessment API that's empowered a variety of integrations (from background checks to coding tests to English tests) while creating a rich experience inside our product so our customers don't have to hop between products in their day-to-day work.
Designed systems that seamlessly move our customers' data from competitors to Ashby in days (vs. industry standard of several months), allow them to use both systems simultaneously, and transition in-flight hiring processes so there is zero downtime switching. This is such a challenging problem that we use it as an interview question to distinguish Staff+ engineers.
Built our Microsoft 365 integration in a few months to unlock business in Europe and non-tech industries. Part of this also required refactoring our Google Workspace integration so that both integrations reuse the same business logic for common tasks.
Built an API and API docs that provide comprehensive data and runnable examples directly on the doc site. Partners rave about it and recommend it to others

Why You Should or Shouldn't Apply
You should apply if:

Happy developers and customers are your happy place. You care deeply about their experience with the software you build and seek to understand them to empower a great experience.
You care about the small things. A mismatched data model, wrong customer configuration, or oddly documented partner API is all that stands between you and complete chaos, and you fear none of it.
You've tackled projects with a lot of product and technical ambiguity, and the intersection of the two is where you thrive. We're not building a simple CRUD API, and many of the challenges we tackle require using your knowledge of our customers to build powerful abstractions and flexibility in the system to solve a class of problems.
You are ambitious and always looking to improve your skills. For most engineers, this role will give you more freedom and responsibilities than you've experienced in the past. To thrive (and level up), you'll need to be open to feedback (and we give lots of it).
You're not afraid to tackle any part of a technology stack. While this role is primarily backend, you do what's necessary to successfully deliver a feature, including writing frontend. We'll provide a supportive environment to do it successfully (e.g., design system, talented frontend engineers).
You seek to create leverage in your work. The nature of software is that you can often automate or abstract what would be tedious, time-consuming work. Your impatience usually leads to new abstractions, tools to allow Support to debug before Engineering, new lint rules to prevent common bugs, etc.

You should not apply if:

You like projects to take months to years. There's always something new in this role and pragmatism is the name of the game. You'll cut scope, make tradeoffs, and always be learning.
You need a company-driven process and structure to get your projects across the finish line. Sprint planning and well-defined project management processes are things you need or look to others to lead. You'd rather focus on the technical details and challenges.
You can get lost in the details. Once you start implementation, it can be hard to take a step back and think about the project as a whole. You like everything to be planned upfront.
You haven't led or taken ownership of projects before. You're used to working with tech leads and taking on tasks they distribute.
A tech lead, staff, or principal engineer, to you, is someone who spends most of their time project managing or doing architecture reviews. Our most tenured engineers spend most of their time building, and we often trust them with our most challenging problems. While they lead product and technical areas and help other engineers plan

What 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. Teams struggle to keep up

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 (and are what we often replace).

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.

Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture is motivated by Benji's (my co-founder and CEO) and my belief that a small talented team, given the right environment, can build high-quality software fast (and work regular hours).
Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate

Our engineering team (and the team at large) consists of lifelong learners who are humble and kind (meet them here). These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally (we filter for it in interviews). We combine this with research, prototyping, and written proposals to see around corners and get feedback from the team across time zones. Focus time is something that we hold sacred, and, with thoughtful and deliberate communication, engineers are in

  • Backend Engineer

    1 month ago

    San Francisco, California, United States Trizone Full time

    Job Title: Backend EngineerLocation: San FranciscoAs a Backend Engineer at Trizone, you will be responsible for designing and implementing the backend infrastructure and systems that power our innovative construction tech solutions. You will work closely with a cross-functional team of software engineers, product managers, and data scientists to build and...

  • Staff Software Engineer, Backend

    4 weeks ago

    San Francisco, California, United States Vartana Full time

    Vartana is the revenue acceleration platform for top-tier enterprise technology companies. We empower sales and finance to accelerate the deal cycle without compromising cash flow through our flexible payment options and collaborative sales closing platform. Our platform is trusted by leading enterprise companies, including Motive, Domo, Samsara, and many...

  • Senior Software Engineer, Backend

    1 month ago

    San Francisco, California, United States Nuna Full time

    YOUR TEAMAs one of the first engineers on the Rewards backend team, you will be crafting an innovative new mobile experience that will redefine the boundaries of health and wellness. Our mission is to improve health outcomes for patients using technology. You will build highly available and scalable backend services to support Rewards mobile experience. You...

  • Software Engineer, Backend

    1 week ago

    San Francisco, California, United States Kiddom Full time

    About KiddomKiddom is a groundbreaking educational platform that promotes student equity and growth by uniting high-quality instructional materials with dynamic digital learning. Through unparalleled curriculum management functionality, Kiddom empowers schools and districts to take ownership of their curriculum – resulting in learning experiences tailored...

  • Sr. Software Engineer, Backend

    1 month ago

    San Francisco, California, United States hims & hers Full time

    About the job:Hims & Hers is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Store Backend Platform team to help build a fast, reliable, and frictionless telemedicine experience. The role will focus mainly within our ecommerce and order management platforms in areas such as product, product catalog, subscriptions, pricing, and payments, building scalable...

  • Backend Engineer

    1 month ago

    San Francisco, California, United States AnswersAi Full time

    AnswersAi is an AI Edtech company focusing on LMS integrations and homework help for students across its webapp, iOS and Android apps. With 1 Million Questions asked, 200,000 users and 100 Million Views, the team of ex Uber, Coinbase and Artemis engineers from UC Berkeley just raised a pre seed round led by Array VC and funds like Cal Innovation Fund and...

  • Mobile SDK Platform Engineer

    1 month ago

    San Francisco, California, United States Seam Full time

    Who we areAbout SeamSeam is building a platform for software developers to connect and manage smart devices in buildings, like locks, thermostats, and intercoms. It provides a way for software applications, like Airbnb, Zillow, and WeWork, to easily interact with and control these devices across various brands and technologies, streamlining the process of...

  • Financial Platform Staff Engineer

    2 days ago

    San Francisco, California, United States Discord Full time

    Come build the future of Discord's business with us We are looking for an impact-focused Staff Engineer to join our world-class Revenue group as we accelerate Discord's growth through the creation of compelling paid products and new business lines. These products allow us to grow our business while keeping Discord's core functionality free. To learn more...

  • Founding Backend Engineer

    1 month ago

    San Francisco, California, United States Sesame Labs Full time

    We're looking to hire our founding backend engineer. You will build and scale world-class backend systems to serve thousands of dApps and millions of people. As a founding engineer you will work closely with the founders to design the entire backend architecture, integrate with several blockchains, and contribute to DevOps, machine learning, and building...

  • Senior Software Engineer

    19 hours ago

    San Francisco, California, United States Block Full time

    Company DescriptionBlock is one company built from many blocks, all united by the same purpose of economic empowerment. The blocks that form our foundational teams - People, Finance, Counsel, Hardware, Information Security, Platform Infrastructure Engineering, and more - provide support and guidance at the corporate level. They work across business groups...

  • Founding Software Engineer

    2 weeks ago

    San Francisco, California, United States Shadeform Full time

    Shadeform is a cloud GPU marketplace that provides a unified platform and API to access cloud GPUs across 15+ cloud providers. We're hiring a founding engineer to further accelerate our growth and move faster towards our goal of making GPU infrastructure widely accessible.We closed a seed round in September '23 and are well capitalized. We run very lean and...

  • Founding Software Engineer

    2 days ago

    San Francisco, California, United States OfOne Full time

    About OfOne:At OfOne, we're reshaping the drive-thru experience with voice AI. We're already helping top-50 restaurant chains operate more efficiently and level-up their customer experience.We're on the lookout for a founding software engineer ready to drive into the voice AI scene. We're offering a chance to deliver software that touches millions of people,...

  • Backend Software Engineer

    2 weeks ago

    San Francisco, California, United States Hazel Health Full time

    Hazel partners with schools and families to provide physical and mental virtual health care that helps students feel better and get back to learning. As telehealth becomes more and more relevant in the lives of children, Hazel is experiencing tremendous company growth. Our innovative response to our nation's call for equitable, affordable, and safe virtual...

  • Senior Software Engineer, Bitcoin Platform

    2 days ago

    San Francisco, California, United States Block Full time

    Company DescriptionBlock is one company built from many blocks, all united by the same purpose of economic empowerment. The blocks that form our foundational teams - People, Finance, Counsel, Hardware, Information Security, Platform Infrastructure Engineering, and more - provide support and guidance at the corporate level. They work across business groups...

  • Senior Flutter Engineer

    1 month ago

    San Francisco, California, United States Motion Recruitment Full time

    This company develops technology that protects the integrity, confidentiality, and privacy of healthcare data while enabling consumers to comprehend it. They create systems that exhibit an accurate picture of the underlying data, are auditable and automated as far as feasible, and, most importantly, are responsive to the needs of our end users.They're...

  • Senior Software Engineer

    2 days ago

    San Francisco, California, United States Bond Full time

    Founded in 2019, Bond's mission is to accelerate the pace of financial innovation and access to capital. Bond is now part of Fortune 500 financial technology company FIS (NYSE:FIS). It's challenging for most businesses to build and offer engaging financial services products to their customers. Whether that's launching a new credit or debit card, a savings...

  • Principal Engineer, Backend

    1 month ago

    San Francisco, California, United States hims & hers Full time

    About the job:Hims and Hers seek an experienced Principal Software Engineer to help build a fast, reliable, and frictionless telemedicine end-user experience. The role will focus on the software that connects our patients to our medical providers. This software allows Clinicians to communicate with patients, see their medical history and any relevant...

  • Senior Engineer

    1 month ago

    San Francisco, California, United States The League Full time

    Company DescriptionThe League is a pre-series A mobile social dating app startup backed by IDG Ventures, xSeed Capital, Cowboy Ventures, Structure Capital, Sherpa Ventures, and many notable angels. The Founder is a Stanford MBA (ex-Google, ex-Salesforce) with a strong product sense (engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon) and a fierce determination to...

  • Backend Software Engineer

    1 month ago

    San Francisco, California, United States ngram Full time

    About ngram:ngram is an early stage AI startup based out of San Francisco. We are building a LifeSciences focussed conversational engine along with AI powered datasets to advance Life Sciences research. We are a team based out of San Francisco, California and Hyderabad, India. What You'll Do:Create Knowledge Graph for Life Sciences industry based on publicly...

  • Software Engineer

    4 weeks ago

    San Francisco, California, United States Platform Venture Studio Full time

    PlatformOS is our proprietary software platform for running Platform Venture Studio. Think of it as "Github for building startups". It captures all of our best practice, allows us to build in the open, and engages the collective intelligence of our network.PlatformOS comprises various responsive web applications, a browser extension, API integrations, and...