Senior IT Engineer

Hey! My name is John 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 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 UTC-5 to UTC-7 timezones. 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.

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.