Data Engineer

About Ashby

We’re building the next generation of recruiting software and we’re starting with a suite of products that helps talent leaders, recruiters, and hiring managers run an efficient and data-driven hiring process.

We are well-funded and backed by great investors, including Y Combinator, Elad Gil and Lachy Groom. We have over 1,300 amazing customers including Ramp, Notion, and Zapier – yet we've only taken the first steps toward a much larger opportunity. In short, it's the perfect time to join! 🚀

About this Role

As a data engineer, you will be responsible for building the foundations of all things data at Ashby. At the foundation, your work will include managing our Snowflake data warehouse, the associated data ingestion, and data modeling infrastructure. Upon that foundation, you will work closely with our product and go-to-market teams to help operationalize data, analysis, and reporting across the organization.

Data Culture at Ashby

At Ashby, we draw a clear distinction between when to look to data for "the answer" and when to use data to aid principled thinking for decision making. In general, a primary consideration is whether or not data is needed to help clarify points of uncertainty. When data is considered necessary, a secondary consideration is to what depth data will be required. Data questions lend themselves to ongoing what about... or what if... explorations, which can be important in some situations but are not always necessary. With these dynamics in mind, we do not foster an environment where every decision we make should be backed by data, but we do foster an environment where teammates ask whether or not data will fit the task at hand well. This, in turn, allows us to operate a lean team focused on projects where data provides true leverage to our overall business and product goals.

As a related but distinct point, Ashby’s data culture as far as transparency and access goes is very open. We share company-wide access to our financial standings, progress, and goals and generally make any data and reporting we do consider valuable broadly available. Outside of constraints related to whether a teammate has access to a particular tool, there are close to no constraints on access the state of the company as told by data or reporting. In general, we would like to continue and extend open access to data throughout the company (with your help!), but with consideration and not as a substitute for principled thinking :)

Requirements

• Expertise in data modeling and data warehousing. Ideally, deep experience and familiarity with dbt, Snowflake and AWS or similar cloud providers

• Proficiency with data orchestration and workflow management tooling (we use Prefect, but prior experience with that tool isn’t a hard requirement)

• Familiarity with standard data integration services (e.g. Fivetran)

• Strong proficiency in SQL and Python

• Experience with custom ETL and “reverse ETL” development using, e.g. REST APIs and webhooks

• Experience modeling and working with product analytics events

• Strong analytical thinking and familiarity with data visualization (i.e. visual communication of results) - relates to autonomy of role

• Excellent written and verbal communication. Ashby has a writing-centric culture, but you will also be responsible for direct collaboration with various teammates

• Interest in working directly with business partners, e.g. product or go-to-market teammates, to identify and plan related data efforts

You could be a great fit if

• You have enjoyed experience as the primary or sole data engineer with full ownership of the data stack

• You have working experience in B2B SaaS

• You're product-minded and analytically curious, eager to explore business and product data

• You have an intuition for solving problems pragmatically and an eye for leverage

• You enjoy collaboration and find reward in enabling other teammates to succeed

• You have strong, experience-backed opinions about data products and data culture in a company setting

Reasons not to apply

• You do not enjoy working directly with analysts or other business stakeholders. This will mean working closely and in earnest with teammates across the company as various data-related needs come up.

• You are looking for consumer-scale data infrastructure projects. We have a huge and interesting set of data to work with (check out our data trends reports!), but we are a B2B SaaS company. Relative to B2C services, we might best be considered small but mighty :)

• You are seeking an in-person work experience. Although there are hot spots of Ashby employees around the world, Ashby is a remote workplace. Rest assured, we do meet up in person for various events throughout the year!

Ashby's Data Stack

As it will undoubtedly be a point of interest, a quick summary of our data stack is provided here. Our production database is postgres, which we integrate into a Snowflake data warehouse via a custom data pipeline. All other business systems are integrated via Fivetran. We use Prefect for orchestration and dbt for data modeling. Frontend event tracking is done via Rudderstack. Data visualization and reporting varies, but the broader company is primarily served standardized analytics via Looker. For version control we use Git/Github (and Github Actions for CI/CD).

Interview Process

Our interview process is thorough — we aim to ensure each person that joins the team is the right fit for Ashby and will provide ample information for you to assess if Ashby is the right fit for you. The process for this role is as follows:

• Recruiter Screen - 30 min

• Hiring Manager Interview - 45 min

• Data Engineering Take Home

• Final Round - about 2.5 hours (can do multi-day)
  

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 😅.

• Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US. We plan to expand this to employees in other countries as situations arise.

• 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.

• If you’re in the US, top-notch health insurance for you and your dependents with all premiums covered by us.

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.