Open Ashby's Staff Product Engineer role for the Americas and the headline says the salary is $232,000 to $323,000. That is a $91,000 spread, which is the kind of range that makes people wonder whether a company is being transparent or just technically compliant.
Click through and it turns out to be six salary bands stacked on top of each other, each one roughly $40,000 to $50,000 wide, each one labelled. Which is a far more useful thing to know before you apply.
Our fifth Company Spotlight goes to Ashby, a company that makes recruiting software and, fittingly, writes down a lot about how it hires.
Everything below comes from Ashby's own job board, job posts, blog and team page, read on September 17, 2026.
Fact box
| What they make | Recruiting software, built around an applicant tracking system |
| Started | Work began in late 2018, per their own blog. Founders Benji Encz and Abhik Pramanik |
| Ecosystem | A TypeScript shop, front and back, on React, GraphQL, Node.js, Postgres and Redis |
| Remote policy | All 71 open roles are remote. Remote-first, with people in 24 countries by their own count |
| Pay transparency | 71 of 71 roles publish a pay range, and 69 mention equity |
| Open roles | 71 on their board: 28 customer success, 23 engineering, 11 sales, the rest across people, marketing, design and product |
How they build
The stack is refreshingly boring, in the good way. Their engineering job posts list "TypeScript (frontend & backend), React, GraphQL API, Node.js, Postgres, Redis", and most of the engineering roles we track repeat it. There is no second backend language hiding in a corner of the job board.
Two things stand out in how they work.
The first is ownership. In their post on leveling and compensation, Ashby describes engineers who "own projects and run them independently in teams of one", including the product and design calls, without sprint planning. That is a specific bet (it suits some engineers enormously and others not at all), and it is nice to see it written down before you apply rather than discovered in week three.
The second is speed. Their Staff Product Engineer posting says "Our CI/CD takes ~10m, and we deploy at least 15x a day." Plenty of companies say they ship fast. Fewer put a number on it in a job post, where a candidate can ask about it in the interview.
They also treat design engineering as its own discipline. There are Design Engineer and Staff Design Engineer roles open in four regions, and the hiring manager on one of them writes that they "made Design Engineering a formal role and department".
How they hire
This is where Ashby goes into the most detail.
For the Staff Product Engineer role, the process is spelled out as three rounds: an introduction with the hiring manager, an hour of pairing inside Ashby's actual codebase, then three hours and fifteen minutes of non-coding interviews. You meet four to six people from engineering along the way. And the post makes a promise worth holding them to: "We read every application and aim to respond to yours within 3-4 days."
Design Engineers get a choice. Either a one hour live technical screen, or a design take-home (about three hours on your own, then a 30 minute live session), with the other one done in the final round.
And yes, they run all of this on their own product. Every role lives on jobs.ashbyhq.com (it would be a strange look otherwise).
How they pay
Ashby publishes its compensation philosophy, not just its bands. Engineering has six levels. Offers come as two or three options that mix salary and equity differently, so you choose where on that trade-off you want to sit. And the target is stated plainly: total compensation "greater than the 75th percentile for your level of performance."
On the job board today, every single one of the 71 roles carries a range, in the local currency of wherever the role is: dollars for the US, Canadian dollars, pounds, euros, and several Asia Pacific currencies.
The observation
Here is the thing a job board summary hides and Ashby's own postings do not.
That $232,000 to $323,000 headline on the Staff Product Engineer role is not one band. Inside the posting it breaks down like this:
| Level and location | Salary |
|---|---|
| Staff, SF and NYC | $250K to $295K |
| Staff, Seattle | $239K to $284K |
| Staff, rest of the US | $232K to $270K |
| Senior Staff, SF and NYC | $272K to $323K |
| Senior Staff, Seattle | $266K to $315K |
| Senior Staff, rest of the US | $252K to $299K |
Two levels times three US pay zones. The $91,000 you see on the summary is mostly the distance between a Staff engineer outside SF, NYC and Seattle and a Senior Staff engineer in San Francisco. It is not negotiating room.
The Senior Product Engineer role does the same with four zones: $210K to $250K in SF and NYC, $204K to $245K in Seattle, $189K to $225K and $178K to $216K in two further US tiers. The floor in SF sits $32,000 above the floor in the lowest tier, which is about 18%.
Two more patterns fall out once you line the roles up.
Pay follows level, not discipline. Staff Product Engineer, Staff Platform Engineer and Staff Design Engineer all show the identical $232K to $323K range for the Americas, and the identical £151K to £246K range in the UK. If you are weighing a platform role against a product role at the same level, the money is not the tiebreaker.
And each region gets its own posting. The same Staff product role appears four times, for the Americas, Canada, the UK and the EU, each with a band in its own currency. It clutters the board a little (four near-identical titles) but it means you never have to guess which band applies to you.
The practical takeaway, beyond Ashby: when a posting shows a very wide range, open it before you judge it. Recruiting software can carry several labelled bands inside one role, and the summary line flattens them into a single scary number. Ashby just happens to be the company that shows its working.
Where this is soft
Everything here is a snapshot of one job board on one day, and pay bands move. Ashby's claims about how they work (teams of one, deploy frequency, response times) are their own words from their own pages. We are reporting what they publish, not auditing whether every team lives up to it. The country count also comes from Ashby, and two of their own pages disagree slightly on it (22 plus in one job post, 24 on the team page).
Close
Companies don't pay for spotlights.
The engineering roles we track, and the stack behind them, are on the Ashby listing. If you want context on why Ashby shows up behind so many of the tech jobs you apply to, our look at which applicant tracking systems run tech hiring is the companion read.
If you work at Ashby and one of those tiers has moved since September 17, or you know a company that publishes its bands in even more detail, tell us in Discord. We would genuinely like to see it.
