Ahrefs

The infrastructure is the company. Ahrefs runs a crawler across the web 24/7 and stores the results in a custom petabyte-scale distributed key-value store. Its index spans trillions of backlinks, trillions of archived HTML snapshots, and billions of pages. The backend is written mostly in OCaml with some C++, the frontend in ReasonML. That is a deliberate bet, not an accident of history. The engineering team describes itself as worshipping functional languages and static typing, leaning hard on code generation and meta-programming, and following DRY and KISS. The motto printed across the careers surface is "first do it, then do it right, then do it better." They rely heavily on open source and publish their own work at github.com/ahrefs.

The org chart is unusual too. There is no conventional product manager role: product designers own PM, design, and leadership for their area. Teams are lean, hierarchy is flat, and the company describes itself as low-ego and offbeat. Hiring reflects the same preference for substance over ceremony. The interview loop is application, recruiter screen, take-home task, then an unstructured technical discussion with no LeetCode, coding puzzles, or whiteboard exercises.