Senior IT Engineer

Hey! My name is John https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-reynolds-74511660/ and I started here at Ashby as IT Manager a few months ago, excited to meet you!

Currently the IT team here is just me, we want to grow that team to keep giving our colleagues world-class service and the most automated, delightful technology to work with during their time at Ashby.

All the responsibilities and requirements are outlined below so have a look. Some points to consider as you’re reading through:

• This is fundamentally a technical role with scope to become the pivotal role in a larger team as we continue to need to scale. That means you’ll be chatting and helping our colleagues just as much as you will be throwing JSON blobs around between APIs. We’re looking for someone who is comfortable doing both.
• As folks in IT we strongly believe in technology as a great enabling force. We’re always looking for novel ways to tackle problems at the fundamental level and that means we’re looking for someone who sees the world a little differently. Whether that’s automating your home out of needing light switches or creating the most glorious CI/CD pipeline in existence we’re looking for people whose technical knowledge and obsession with optimisation can make extraordinary outcomes happen.
• Finally the problems we help people tackle daily are as much emotional as they are technical. Whilst it’s great to be able to provide the best technical solution to an issue we strive to be able to deliver emotional catharsis alongside this. That means listening to people, meeting them where they are and providing the reassurance, empathy and genuine human connection that every great support interaction should have.
• I’m the hiring manager for this role and would be the manager for the successful candidate as well. If you want to learn a little more of my background I have a public about me page https://hire.john-reynolds.com/about-me?source=copy_link you’re welcome to look through!

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Own and triage customer issues from ingest through to resolution, whether that’s a one-time fix or a full project including org-wide changes

Offer, advocate and then implement best practices for an IT function that is securely creating the most productive workforce in the world

Own projects across device management (think Kandji, Crowdstrike), identity management (think Okta, Google Workspace), hardware logistics (think laptop shipping, accessories lifecycle) and user lifecycle (onboarding, offboarding and user changes) to automate manual process and reduce our touchpoints to solely those where the human interaction matters

REQUIREMENTS:

• Purely due to the small size of the team and my location (Portugal), this role would need to be filled by someone with regular work hours in a timezone matching one in the contiguous USA (Pacific to Eastern). At this stage we won’t be considering candidates outside of these timezones, sorry!
• Experience across a range of technical systems, basic understanding of systems design, APIs and the underlying technologies that make modern SaaS systems work
• Desire to work in and help build a small team of experts with an open, engaged and radically efficient profile
• A strong belief that end user support is an equally important part of being a well-rounded engineer as building world-class automations
• The ambition to challenge norms and build for scale and flexibility outside of the expected
• The humility to accept the thoughts and emotions of others as valuable before your own and be vulnerable in front of others
• The wisdom to know when it’s best to apply the above

NON-REQUIREMENTS:

• Deep experience in exactly our tech stack. Always useful, always teachable
• A certain amount of years of experience in the IT world in particular

A SAMPLE OF WHAT YOU COULD END UP WORKING ON OVER TIME:

• Helping end users with their everyday issues, tracing those back to root causes and rolling out fixes that are structural and lasting where it makes sense to do so.
• Using Terraform and Git to make our critical systems (device management, IAM) transparent, self-documenting and audit-ready
• Rolling out more nuanced authentication policies to ensure device and posture attestation alongside update policies for devices and software
• Advocating for role-based access control and birthright access as well as tackling the upstream implications of this in terms of people data change-control and planning
• Automating everyday processes such as managed device reconciliation across systems using either no-code tools (Okta Workflows) , low-code tools (Retool) or code (Typescript)

WHAT YOU’LL NOT BE WORKING ON:

• Break/fix cycles where root causes can reasonably be tackled. You should be empowered to fix problems not delay symptoms.
• Non-stop tickets. Everyone in the team is expected to contribute equally to interrupt-driven and systemic issues, no first or second line here.
• Traditional corporate IT. We use a relatively standard “startup stack” which means nearly everything is cloud based, devices are majority MacOS with a very small Linux subset and we have the agency and ability to move fast and with outsized impact.

If you’d like to hear a little more about the role, I’ve made a video walkthrough here:

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.
• 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.

HOW THIS HIRING PROCESS WORKS

We want to try and be as transparent as possible about how our hiring process works. Here's what we're doing for this role:

THE APPLICATION PHASE

For the application phase we're using cohort hiring. https://www.ashbyhq.com/podcast/episodes/cohort-hiring That means:

• This application will be open until 17:00 UTC on January the 20th. We will not be hiring anyone or closing this opening before this point so everyone has an opportunity to knowing their application will definitely be reviewed and considered carefully.
• We won't be sending rejection communication or advancing anyone until after the role closes so please don't expect to hear anything until this role closes outside of acknowledging receipt of your application.
• We will reply to every application letting you know whether we'd like to advance or not. This should happen within 1-2 working days of the application closing. If the application volume is larger it might take longer than this but you should receive a response within a maximum of 1 working week of the application closing.
• Considering the large volume of applications we won't be able to give specific feedback at this point. Apologies but we want to be thoughtful and considered with any feedback we do provide and we can't do this at the application phase.

THE INTERVIEW PHASE

If you're invited to continue with the application congratulations! Here's what will happen next:

• You will be invited to book time in for a 30 minute call with me as a basic hiring manager screen. We'll be looking for answers to initial questions like:
• Why do you want this role?
• Can you clearly and crisply convey both your technical and social capability to excel in this role?
• Are there outstanding questions we can answer?
• Assuming this goes well we'll invite you back for a longer (60 minute) hiring manager interview with me. In this interview we will:
• Dive much deeper in to your background and try and tease out concrete examples of technical ability
• Test your ability to think more broadly and ambitiously about what excellence looks like in IT
• Answer any deeper questions you might have now we're further into the process and you have more context on the company and tech stack.

3. The Next Stage Is A Take-home Test Which Is Split In To Two Main Areas

• A section devoted to testing harder skills largely around systems and paradigms you may use regularly here at Ashby
• Thinking more broadly about what excellent looks like in a meaningful process everyone at Ashby will go through
• Following this, you'll get to meet some more of the team! Specifically you'll have a cross-functional interview where you'll meet:
• Someone from the People function who might have some questions about interacting with the People team and how to build a successful relationship across functions.
• Someone from the Support function who may ask about how best to delight customers and provide the best experience possible in a sustainable way.
• As a final step, you'll have a chance to meet with Abhik https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhikpramanik/ who will be completing a final appraisal of your fit for the the role. This is also a great opportunity to answer any burning questions you might have about Ashby from someone with all of the context!

Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.