Product Engineer - Americas

Hi 👋🏾 I’m Abhik, Ashby's Co-Founder and VP of Engineering. Our engineering culture strives to recreate the environments where we did our best work as ICs – where we had the ownership and agency to impact our users with creative and innovative software.

I started my career building software for artists in the Visual Effects industry. It was a formative experience for me as a software engineer, not just because the work was fun but because success relied on my ability to be a product manager and designer. I talked to artists to understand their needs. I came up with ideas. I did industry research, designed interfaces, and prototyped ideas. I watched artists use what I built and decided what to tackle in the next iteration. No daily stand-ups, no t-shirt sizing, no planning meetings.

It was an exhilarating experience to have straight out of college. I studied computer science to solve problems using software in a way that wasn’t possible before – not be a JIRA jockey. My first job allowed me to do just that, and I felt creative and fulfilled.

When I moved to technology startups, I saw my role narrow (significantly as the company grew), and the enjoyment of building software went with it. It was disheartening because, in Visual Effects, I witnessed some of the most innovative ideas from experienced engineers who blended their technical skills with customer empathy and business context. Such ideas came from the engineers' in-depth knowledge of how software is built, allowing them to create new abstractions or implement technology in novel ways. It’s a level of creativity that is difficult for most product managers or designers to achieve.

I still saw these ideas in technology startups, but as the team grew, these ideas often came to fruition through force of will and the engineer’s ability to push back against the company’s culture (rather than any encouragement from it). Engineering became narrowed to implementation and delivery, partly due to the influence of other departments and partly due to the influx of "Agile" processes like sprint planning.

I don’t want that to happen at Ashby. We’re building an environment that is optimistic about what engineers can own and achieve. An environment that embraces the innovative engineers, and frankly, often stays out of their way. As a Product Engineer, you’ll take ownership over a large portion of one of our products and own …