Head of Platform & Infrastructure Engineering

Quick Facts

• Role: Head of Platform & Infrastructure Engineering

• Focus: Performance, reliability, monitoring/incident management, and platform scaling

• Reporting: Directly to the CTO

Description

You will lead Platform & Infrastructure to ensure Ashby remains performant and reliable as the company scales. The role includes creating a long-term vision and 6-month roadmap, growing the team, improving monitoring and incident management, and partnering with Product Engineering so they can move fast without breaking performance or reliability. You will also maintain key vendor relationships and negotiate pricing for critical hosting and observability infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain a long-term vision and 6-month roadmap for Platform & Infrastructure

• Grow the Platform & Infrastructure team; hire ICs and managers and create a headcount plan

• Evaluate whether specialized roles are needed (e.g., DB Admin)

• Improve collaboration with Product Engineering to enable independent fast delivery

• Assess and improve monitoring and incident management, including uptime measurement and Support coordination

• Manage vendor relationships and negotiate pricing for hosting/observability (AWS, ClickHouse, Datadog, Braintrust)

• Lead managers and continue building a strong engineering culture and processes for platform reliability

• Support DevEx strategy (with a dedicated DevEx team), either directly or via Product Engineering alignment

Requirements

• Important role leading a company through a high-growth period (IC Lead or Engineering Leader)

• High-quality decisions under pressure; balance short-term fixes with long-term investments

• Experience hiring and building hiring processes

• Designed interviews/interview loops and led hiring strategy

• Excellent collaboration with other departments (Product Engineering, Product, Sales, Support)

• Knowledge of platform/infrastructure technologies, networking, and hardware

• Deep understanding of Kubernetes networking/traffic flow and how hardware/cloud abstractions can break

• Great communicator, particularly in writing; can explain infrastructure to non-experts

• Comfort managing a distributed team across Americas West Coast and Europe

• PST–GMT time zone availability required

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity

• 10-year exercise window for stock options

• Unlimited PTO

• Minimum 12 weeks fully paid parental leave

• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget

• $100/month education budget (more expensive items with manager approval)

• Top-tier health insurance for US employees and dependents (100% premium coverage); supplemental coverage fully covered outside the US