Team
We're a nimble team of humans working together to do big things.
Ashby is a remote-first company with colleagues working from 15 countries in North America and Europe. We meet in person at least once a year in Europe and in our office in San Francisco.
Our 2022 holiday book exchange 🎄
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I designed and built our HRIS integrations with Rippling and BambooHR. Instead of manually copying data on hired candidates from Ashby to their HRIS, customers can do it with the click of a button!
Something I've helped the team with...
I built a script that enabled our team to import our customers' candidate data from CSV files. It's enabled us to work with technology partners and recruiting firms that haven't yet integrated with Ashby.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The flexibility and breadth of the product was definitely something that surprised me when I joined Ashby. I was impressed by all of the existing capabilities of the product, and I'm excited to help expand and improve on what we've already built!
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built Ashby's design system. It's enabled the team to design and launch well designed products; often without a full-time designer! While we have room to improve, customers consistently comment on how well designed Ashby is.
Something I've helped the team with...
I implemented code that tagged all client Sentry errors with a link to a video recording of the user session. It was a small change but it continues to help us create repro steps for obscure bugs and fix them, often without a user even reporting it!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I continue to be surprised at the depth we can go with each feature we've built. While we can improve our customer's lives with a first version, it often uncovers even more impactful problems or inefficiencies we can solve. We've only scratched the surface of what Ashby can do for our customers!
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I moved our calendar and email sync from a brute force cron job to real-time sync. It's helped both customers and our team: customers now have the most up-to-date information when scheduling and following up with candidates and we've able to scale sync as we grow with minimal effort.
Something I've helped the team with...
I've added monitoring and observability to a lot of our infrastructure at Ashby: Datadog monitors to alert us when things go wrong, linking Sentry issues to DataDog traces, logging SQL explains for inefficient SQL generated by our query engine. It's greatly reduced the stress of being on-call, provided context when debugging a product issue, and helped us proactively catch performance bottlenecks before they become a real problem.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The impact that a small, engineering-focused team can have in building and shaping such a complex product.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built Ashby's in-app e-signature feature. Before, our customers had to generate the document in Ashby, upload it to an e-signature service like DocuSign, set up the signature blocks, get the signatures, download the signed document, and upload it back to Ashby. Now this entire process is automated!
Something I've helped the team with...
In my first month, I upgraded many of our core libraries to the latest major version (e.g. Create React App) and migrated us from TSLint to ESLint. With these changes, other engineers had faster build and reload times and more issues caught in CI (versus in production)!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I continue to be surprised at how well we live our "build for the long term" engineering principle. It's amazing how often I find myself building off of the building blocks of others, versus having to build new one-off components.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I redesigned and rebuilt the user interface for filters (which is used everywhere!) to make it easier to use while having much more flexibility than it had previously.
Something I've helped the team with...
I'm helping other engineers write more robust and modular CSS through pair programming sessions and creating reusable layout components in our design system.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Too many to list. Amazingly competent, thoughtful, and kind team. A sense of calmness throughout my week. Lots of well written documents. And last but not least, very sharp and candid leadership.
Emily Ellis
Engineering
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built the default dashboards presented on each job. While our reporting features are very powerful, not everyone has the time to build reports. The default job dashboard gives our customers a comprehensive set of metrics out of the box. I knew it would be useful, but I was still surprised at how enthusiastic our customers were about it when it launched.
Something I've helped the team with...
We'd sometimes ship bugs that didn't take into consideration all our product types. I modified our data generation script to create multiple organizations of different product types in our testing environments. Now both engineers and QA can be more comprehensive in their testing without manual setup.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
That "this meeting could have been an email" isn't just a joke. People actually send emails here instead of defaulting to Zoom calls. It's refreshing.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I created Ashby's newest interview used to hire two SREs. We strive to have interviews emulate real work and I designed a debugging interview that simulates a real-world page that the candidate needs to find the root cause for.
Something I've helped the team with...
I noticed engineers were spending a lot of time investigating customer issues, so I built some charts to measure customer issue growth and distribution. The data informed process changes and increased headcount in both support and engineering!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How big fans our customers are of Ashby (recommending us warmly to prospects, sending lots of love for our product and CS team) and how big supporters we are of our customers (sharing referrals, proactively solving issues with their hiring).
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
Implemented improvements and automations around account management that improved the user experience and helped Ashby to grow in an efficient way.
Something I've helped the team with...
The way we provided Security information to prospective customers was too cumbersome for everyone involved. I rolled out a Trust Center that has all information in one place with automated approval for existing customers and prospects, cutting down the time reducing the time necessary for security review in the sales cycle.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Moving from Slack-heavy past places to an organization that has adjusted to asynchronous collaboration (https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/thoughtful-communication) took me a while to get adjusted. Now I really being able to work uninterrupted on tasks and projects for hours at a time.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've been having a lot of deep technical conversations with the team on topics like database query performance, capacity planning, and infrastructure changes. This has led to a project that should increase query performance by 100x!
Something I've helped the team with...
I've improved our alerting system so that engineers have fewer distractions and even more time to focus.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The thoughtful passion that runs through the engineering team. Proposals and specs often get a lot of feedback — and it's feedback that matters and written in a way that really helps.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've built an integration for doing background checks with the click of a button (using Checkr). The integration allows the user to stay in Ashby and keep focus on the hiring process. Our own hiring managers use it for every hire and love it!
Something I've helped the team with...
At Ashby, we're obsessed about writing technical specs and documentation when starting a new project. I helped introduce a new process to improve collaboration in the spec-writing phase and ensure a broader perspective from the beginning. The feedback from the engineering team has only been positive.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I was most surprised about how well the team is collaborating. Ashby has an extremely talented team and someone is always ready to help out. There's a high amount of trust and lot of focus on knowledge sharing, documentation and distribution of decisions.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built advanced filter functionality on Offer Custom Fields. This is an improvement on the flexible Custom Field concept, and unlocks a wide array of use-cases for our customers. Moreover, I think this feature is an example of how features can be more: they continue to build on top of existing building blocks. This is something that the Engineering team at Ashby excels at: developing not just particular features, but constructing building blocks and developing on top of those to incrementally improve the entire product over time.
Something I've helped the team with...
At Ashby, it's the norm to develop features in a way that promotes collaboration and allows others to move faster. During some of the features I've been working on, I've had an opportunity to improve internal tooling for developers. One example is a template string constructor to format Markdown messages. This allows us to automatically and uniformly escape user input, and format URLs, DateTime, and other objects without worrying about escaping or using the correct syntax.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Coming in, I knew there was a strong focus on thoughtful communication. What still caught me by surprise, however, is how much is actually communicated. I had the impression beforehand that people might choose to omit communicating something to avoid noise, or otherwise consolidate their messaging so it's a single interruption. I now realize it's more about managing the channels of communiciation rather than the amount of information. Because there's a broadly shared vision and understanding of how communication works at Ashby, it is relatively easy to deal with all the moving pieces and sharing of information.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I designed and implemented the ability to multi-select candidates in our pipeline view and perform bulk actions. Customers use it multiple times daily and it saves them a lot of clicks!
Something I've helped the team with...
I revamped our input field components in our design system with a new more flexible API for layout and interactions. Other engineers have been able to quickly create visually pleasing forms and profile pages with minimal effort!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I'm surprised at how quickly the market has embraced us as a critical improvement to existing tools. People are really blown away when they see what we can do for them.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I created a feature that enables our users to import data from CSV files and map it to any record or related record in Ashby. Previously, customers had to reach out to support, support reached out to an engineer, and the engineer had to configure and run a script to import the data. Now it's entirely self-serve.
Something I've helped the team with...
Originally meant to be a feature for our users, I added the ability to refresh the cache for reports. It coincidentally made the lives of engineers easier. If they changed any logic during development, they could easily refresh the cache to see the changes.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
It's amazing to see how every single person on the team is dedicated to building the right thing the right way for the long term. I've never experienced a group of people being so aligned in creating and maintaining best practices, documentation, and tooling to make the best possible product.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I moved our report generation to a worker-based infrastructure with caching. Running Ashby reports is computationally expensive because of how flexible it is and with this change, we've been able to increase the number and size of our customers without impacting our other features and services.
Something I've helped the team with...
I built our database schema migration system. It compares our Typescript models to what exists in our database and automatically generates an up and down migration that adds, removes, or updates tables, columns, foreign keys, and constraints.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How complex some of the problems are in recruiting. Giving talent teams the tools to get insights and be productive gives us really interesting problems to solve with software.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I got the opportunity to build a novel feature, Application Limits. This feature enables organizations to set up rules to limit the applications a single candidate can submit to a job (or set of jobs matching a customizable filter). This gives customers more time to see new candidates rather than sifting through repeat applications. This feature was a direct response to the changing hiring environment in 2023 where talent teams were flooded with record number of applications and shows how nimble and adaptable Ashby is!
Something I've helped the team with...
I made some updates to our bulk action framework: conditional fields and undoable bulk actions. Conditional fields only appear if certain conditions are met. Undoable bulk actions give users a chance to undo the bulk action after it begins. As our customers increase in size, bulk actions will become a greater part of their workflow. These new features enable developers to build more powerful and flexible bulk actions faster.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Most refreshing is Ashby's approach to "shipping." Ashby doesn't just celebrate code releases to production, which fosters a mentality that overly optimizes on one output. At Ashby, we also celebrates the "little" things like new documentation, research done, test fixes, specs read and written, new job postings and other cross functional tasks. Overlooked but valuable activities have a platform to shine.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I set up a new type of integration that allows Ashby users to automatically create and attach CodeSignal live interview sessions to their interview invitations. The integration is designed so that we can easily extend it to support creating more interview resource types in the future!
Something I've helped the team with...
I’ve worked on streamlining our API validation to make it easier for engineers to add new endpoints quickly and safely. I’ve also started converting our API docs to the OpenAPI format. This will eventually allow us to generate API validations from our documentation and automate the process of publishing our documentation.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I’ve been surprised by how extensive the product is —especially considering the size of the team. It’s been very impressive to see how many different feature areas there are while onboarding. Everyone encourages each other to build for the long term and I think this plays a big role in why the team has been able to build such a powerful product with a small team.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built an integration with the Paylocity HRIS system that allows our customers to seamlessly send their hired candidate data to their onboarding module and avoid manually entering data that already exists in Ashby.
Something I've helped the team with...
I made it much easier for our team to see how many additional email lookups our customers have and when they expire. Our support and success teams used to have to manually calculate which email lookups are part of the base plan and which were purchased separately. They then had to figure out when additional email lookups expired and sometimes trick the system into doing the right thing. Now it's properly tracked and easy to adjust!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How mature Ashby as a company is. Everything's well documented, there's structure, and the product itself is of high quality which shows that it was built with the long-term in mind. At the same time, it's easy to communicate and make decisions without any bureaucratic hurdles. It's truly amazing to see how much a small team can achieve.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
There were some legacy settings in Ashby the confused nearly everyone — customers, the support team, and developers. I overhauled the entire thing, making the UI more clear and intuitive and refactoring the logic behind it to be more straightforward and easier to extend if the need arises.
Something I've helped the team with...
I implemented a toast notification system for a fairly barebones internal application. Before, when someone made an update, there was no positive feedback to the user that the change they made actually went through. Now with the notification system, users have much more confidence that the changes they are making are taking effect.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
On the surface, applicant tracking systems don't seem that exciting — Ashby turns that assumption on it's head! The more I learn about the application, the more excited about Ashby I become. The passion and excitement from the team is contagious and is clearly reflected in the quality of app that has been (and continues to be) built!
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
I'm excited to help support my coworkers on GTM teams. Building tools that reduce toil and help folks focus on the best part of their jobs is incredibly rewarding.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
Onboarding at Ashby has been so smooth. From getting my developer environment set up, to making meaningful changes fast, to meeting the team, every part has been well thought out and very inviting.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
It's actually been pretty unsurprising. The way Ashby presents itself in job descriptions, as well as throughout the interview process, really does capture the culture and the priorities of the team. Through that process, I felt confident that I wanted to join this team, and my experience so far has backed up that confidence.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I implemented syncing data from other recruiting software into Ashby. It opened up Ashby's powerful reporting features to customers who can't use our all-in-one product yet.
Something I've helped the team with...
I sped up our automated tests on CI by 10x; they now run in under 10 minutes. We're able to make changes and deploy much faster than we could before.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
What's always surprising to me, is how each existing feature in Ashby instantly produces some additional value to a new feature. For example, when I worked on a data integration feature all the data that got integrated was automatically exposed to Ashby's analytics features. If you build something at Ashby, very often you'll be able to take some existing building blocks and use them in a new feature with only a little bit of glue code.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
When scheduling interviews, hiring managers previously had to send a confirmation email after completing the scheduling process, which required extra clicks and was easy to skip by mistake. I built a feature which allows default confirmation emails to be configured in the scheduling flow so that they can be sent out automatically when the interview panel is finalized! This new flow is especially useful because it allows the email to be previewed and customized before finalizing the schedule and sending calendar invites.
Something I've helped the team with...
A few months ago, I came across an integral part of our application which was both complex and under-documented. I took the time to write up clear documentation and was thrilled when another teammate (Morten) followed it up with a refactor of the original API!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Our team has high standards, but never at the expense of a supportive environment! I always get the help that I need when I need it, and whenever I launch a feature, I feel greatly appreciated for my hard work.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built a new service for converting offer letters and signature documents. Our old system didn't support all the features necessary to successfully convert the wide variety of documents our customers had. The new service supports is much less likely to randomly rearrange documents and we have better tooling to monitor, debug, and fix problems.
Something I've helped the team with...
I automated the application of database index migrations in production, replacing a manual process. Better for security and less busy-work for engineers!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
New hires are trusted like other engineers to make decisions and ship changes to the product. It's a little intimidating, but also really exciting to complete a task in your first few days and see it go live almost immediately.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I added the employee permissions history panel and underlying audit logging. This will help customers work out why and when things have changed in their data and reduce the load on our team investigating.
Something I've helped the team with...
I updated the organization administration UI to have collapsible sections. This small change helped different people who used the UI to administer different parts of an organization and saved them time.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How much has been built and the quality of the features and the underlying code. There's a lot here and a lot still to be built but it's been easy to find and understand everything I've come across so far.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've helped increase recruiter efficiency by making our bulk data import functionality easier to use and available to more internal users. I've also made workflow improvements across the app, from performance boosts for in-app notifications to fixing tricky caching issues with our candidate pipeline views.
Something I've helped the team with...
I've improved our codebase health by investing in our feature flag tooling and encouraging others to remove old flags after full rollout. We ship a lot, often, so our flag count was climbing rapidly, but we've now stabilised that growth and removed a lot of dead code in the process!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
In engineering, the speed of shipping, unlocked by autonomy, an excellent team, and solid tooling. At Ashby overall, I've really appreciated the coherent company strategy which is documented, shared company-wide, and thoughtfully reviewed and updated.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
With large flexible applications like Ashby the most interesting challenge for me is how to allow the user to do what they want without thinking about the tool. Building the right feature with the right automation, interface, information architecture, can make a complex task simple.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
Lots of companies have a mission for an engineer to ship on the first day, but not a great plan after that. Ashby's onboarding does a good job of creating the habit of deploying so the first week jitters dissipate, and the scope of the changes grows steadily.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The amount of exposure we get even as engineers to what the clients are saying. From recordings of sales, and research calls, to direct written feedback & feature requests. For a product as large as Ashby it will be important to have a good understanding and connection with the end user.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
One of the key reasons behind the depth and breadth of Ashby's feature set is the engineering team's focus on creating generic building blocks that support a variety of use cases. I'd like to help build the next building block that unlocks new features and delivers value to our customers.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
This has been the most structured and well thought out onboarding I've ever had! The starter tasks were a great way to ease into the codebase, and there's PLENTY of documentation on product and processes. The product intro and deep dive sessions helped build a deeper understanding of how everything fits together. To top it all off, everyone has been super friendly and helpful!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The scale and quality of what's been built and how easy it is to navigate the massive codebase.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
Too many things. There are quite a few exciting projects in-flight that I want to contribute to in addition to setting up the codebase for even-more rapid iteration.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
Thorough and supported. There is a lot of product to understand, but Ashby's culture of writing documents it well via normal process.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The amount intention behind decisions. Features and code are thought through super well and the emphasis is on getting it right over speed. But, there is enough in place that we still can ship fast.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've made various improvements to our API, shipped a few new endpoints and automated the creation of some of our documentation. I've shipped a new partner integration, as well as lots of other minor tasks!
Something I've helped the team with...
I've worked on some of our internal tooling, adding features to streamline people's workflows.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The dedication to a productive and trusting work environment is very refreshing. The flexibility and freedom as to how I work and the rigorous lack of non-useful meetings means I feel like I'm shipping a huge amount already!
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
Ashby's broad and deep feature set provides many interesting UI, UX, and architectural opportunities. I'm looking forward to building on top of this with features that are easy and pleasant to use, whilst still meeting the needs of power users!
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
The whole process has been extremely smooth - well thought out, structured, and considerate. Support has been available at every step, and everyone has been quick to assist when needed.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The emphasis on getting things done, avoiding unnecessary busy work, keeping calendars clear and maximising focus time. It is refreshing and very much welcome.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
As Ashby's product offering keeps growing daily, I'd like to help create the tools that will allow the company to unlock more customers and more complex use cases.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
Very clear and well organized. You start to contribute very quickly and you get a lot of exposure to multiple areas of the product and the company. The product is huge and there are a lot of resources to ramp up very quickly.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The speed from the engineering team. It's amazing that we release changes and new features multiple times per day to our customers.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
I'm looking forward to improving the product and the internal tools in all sorts of ways, from small quality-of-life improvements to larger features or tools. Our customers have very high expectations, and I'm excited to help exceed them.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
Excellent! Very smooth. Nothing has caught me off guard. I've been able to answer so many of my questions through the documentation, and my manager and onboarding buddies have been very available and helpful. As a developer, I've been able to ship from the first day, which feels great. Also, having a list of tasks from day one has given me a clear direction and purpose.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I want to highlight three things that I already knew before joining but are even better than I expected. First, it's very cool to be building a product that you use or have used. Second, our customers are truly impressive: the hottest companies in the world choose Ashby (check the logos on the homepage!). Finally, I'm amazed by how much our customers love Ashby. The word of mouth is real: they become instant advocates and recommend us to their friends and colleagues.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
Added tracking of IP addresses for submitted applications and allowed customers to edit the schedule of an interview before sending a scheduling request.
Something I've helped the team with...
Built a history view for the schedule to help with debugging scheduling issues.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How much time I can focus on deep work is amazing. Once you experience that, you really start to wonder how you could ever work any other way.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
Ashby's ability to grow with your team rather than grow out of it. Whether it's UI/UX or engineering, the challenge of building a tool that caters to both small and large teams is one I'm excited to tackle. I'm looking forward to working with the team here to build a lovable product that will delight our customers.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
Thoughtfully intentionally - From day one, every day has had a clear objective to get me closer to becoming a confident and integral member of the team.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The autonomy (like real autonomy...). Everyone here is extremely talented so it's easy to see how there is a deep trust in one another to do the right thing for our customers. Additionally, everyone is genuinely supportive of each other which helps validate our abilities and further strengthen that trust.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
As one of my first contributions, I built an internal tool that improves the development process for our main website. More recently, in an unexpected turn of events, I built the Ashby One conference website on a tight deadline and on a platform with which I had no prior experience. This enabled our marketing team to proceed with the planned launch on schedule.
Something I've helped the team with...
One of my very first projects at Ashby was the inline Email Templates previews, and it has definitely had the most impact so far. Super-grateful to Moody for helping steer its direction. It’s an incredibly useful feature, and I’m confident users love it. I’m super excited about the opportunity of building something that will surpass the impact of that!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The most surprising thing about Ashby is the speed and intuitiveness of the development experience, particularly for a product that is so developed and mature. The top-notch DevOps experience that the team has built enables us to ship new features at an incredible rate.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
I'm looking forward to supporting engineers to do their best work - keeping them motivated and challenged whilst building a world class product.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
It has been fantastic so far. Everything is very well organised and there is a lot of thought and intention behind every step of the process without making people feel overwhelmed by how complex the product is.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The emphasis on thoughtful communication is real and it does really work. In spite of it being very different from a lot of other companies, everyone is incredibly supportive and I'm always able to get useful responses from everyone in the team.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
I always look for ways to make any process easy for customers. Minimizing friction and optimizing workflow is where I hope to make the biggest impact.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
Ashby's onboarding was seriously the best I've experienced. Super organized and smooth. My onboarding buddy really helped me get everything set up and showed me around.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How helpful and supportive everyone at Ashby is.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
I would love to work on features and improvements to continue making Ashby a delightful product to use. I've been extremely impressed by the thoughtful way Ashby structures the hiring process from both the employer and candidate perspective. I am excited to contribute to Ashby's structured yet flexible approach to an ATS and beyond.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
It's been the clearest and most well supported onboarding experience of my career! The wealth of documentation and thoughtful communication guidelines have given me the tools to help myself and the confidence to reach out for help when I need it. Even though the company is remote, people have been friendly and welcoming.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The implicit trust and deeply held belief that your peers are going to make the right call and do the best thing for Ashby customers and for the team. I also am very impressed by the speed and level of automation in the developer experience for a team of Ashby's size.
