Senior Backend Engineer, Api and Integrations

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**:

- _ 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 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._ S