Senior Engineering Manager - EMEA Time Zones

Hi 👋 I’m Colin, Director of Engineering, Europe. How do you feel about engineers writing product specs, making product decisions, and not breaking down projects into individual tickets? If that sounds exciting (even if a bit scary), read on because I’m looking for an engineering manager to help us build a different type of engineering team and culture at Ashby.

To start, why do we need to be different? Time and again, I have witnessed engineers knowing what needs to be done yet being unable to get things done because of “the process” or because “more data is needed.” Some of the most effective projects have been skunkworks projects, where engineers have taken total ownership of a problem and driven it to completion. I want to normalize that at Ashby.

When we think about how these processes came about, we realize they carry a pessimistic mindset. They box people into smaller roles to minimize the chance of not meeting a certain standard. At Ashby. we’re building an environment that is optimistic about what engineers can own and achieve and embraces the innovative engineers (and frankly, often stays out of their way).

Doing this requires a broader set of skills in individual engineers. Technical and product management skills blended with customer empathy and business context. Finding and growing people with such a broad set of skills is a challenge, it’s also deeply fulfilling.

To accomplish this, our engineering leaders need to think deeply about process, culture, and individual performance - not running sprint planning or driving product and technical decisions. You’ll focus on building your team, their skills to thrive with the ownership they’re given, and an environment that empowers them to do their best work consistently, with little distraction.

This role is heavily focused on growing engineers. For example, many managers view themselves as working to unblock engineers. We view that managers should be coaching engineers on how to unblock themselves.

We’ve already gathered an experienced, talented, and collaborative team of 25+ engineers. You’ll help me manage the growing team of engineers in Europe.

We try to stay within 10 direct reports for each engineering manager to spend time with our teams observing, correcting, praising, and, yes, coding – opening this role is part of our commitment to this paced growth.

In addition to working with engineers you’ll also get to work on projects yourselves. Some examples of …