Senior Product Designer

About the role

We're looking for a versatile, intrinsically motivated designer who is excited to contribute to rethinking how modern software is designed. At Ashby, you'll be part designer, part product manager, part consultant, and part design system manager (or some combination of the four!). Our unique approach is working—we're growing >100% year-over-year and have notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. Our growth and retention metrics are best-in-class among our peers: tens of millions in ARR, very low churn, and many years of runway. We're backed by amazing investors like Y Combinator, Elad Gil, and Lachy Groom.

How we work

At Ashby, we take a principled approach to design. Unlike traditional product teams where designers receive briefs from product managers and hand off mocks to engineers, we believe design should be integrated throughout the entire process. Design is required in varying degrees on each project, and sometimes the designer may even act as the product manager, owning a project from beginning to end. This approach has allowed Ashby to challenge incumbents in multiple verticals and avoid settling for the status quo.

The design department’s role is not to make every design decision but to equip the entire product team to make better decisions themselves, while also tackling the biggest design challenges. We maintain a near seed-stage-like culture with fuzzy lines between roles, high autonomy, and a focus on individual contributor work with an almost-no-meeting culture. You get the scale of a growth-stage startup with the agency and minimal red tape of a seed-stage company.

What we’re building

Ashby provides talent teams with intelligent and powerful software to streamline hiring processes. Recruiters perform thousands of daily tasks to coordinate between candidates, interviewers, and hiring managers, often struggling to keep up. For example, scheduling a final round involves collecting candidate availability, identifying interviewers, performing "Calendar Tetris" to align schedules, and adjusting for last-minute changes—all while balancing interviewer workloads and training needs.

Ashby automates or simplifies these tasks, offering insights into inefficiencies and designing products that are approachable for beginners but powerful for advanced users. In many ways, we aim to set a new standard like spreadsheets did—and often replace them.

Responsibilities

• Consult for engineers on layout, typography, flows, and other design challenges.
• Investigate problems by engaging with GTM teams, talking to customers, requesting data, and presenting confident assumptions about design proposals.
• Use Figma to create visual artifacts for stakeholder alignment.
• Write specification docs (specs) to detail design proposals and secure stakeholder alignment on key decisions.
• Take ownership of larger product features, considering Jobs-To-Be-Done, navigation, information architecture, layout, interaction, and more.
• Incorporate customer feedback and heuristics to build a usability backlog and propose projects for engineers.
• Consolidate and refine our design system to ensure it is functional, aesthetic, and best-in-class.

Requirements

• 4+ years of product design experience in desktop SaaS.
• Able to think from first principles instead of applying standard UX processes.
• Can break down complex user problems by asking questions that narrow the solution space.
• Enough experience that your intuition can solve many usability problems without relying solely on data, metrics, or user research.
• Curious and resourceful enough to devise creative solutions and de-risk them appropriately.
• Strong skills in layout, navigation, information architecture, UI, and interaction design.
• Strong visual design skills and an obsession with craft and details.
• Bonus: Experience at an early-stage startup or as a solo designer on a team.

Why you should or shouldn’t apply

You may want to apply if you’re excited about:

• Creating leverage and impact far beyond what you'd see in a typical EPD product team structure. You won’t be a cog in the wheel—the team is small and your contributions will be significant.
• Working on all parts of a massive product surface area—spanning many user types, Jobs-To-Be-Done, and usability challenges. You won’t be stuck on one problem for years.
• Helping reinvent the design model for modern enterprise software. You won’t be bogged down by wireframes, user journeys, or personas—what matters is solving customer problems, and the tools you use are up to you.
• Covering all parts of the design process with a focus on design craft. While you’ll occasionally conduct user research interviews, you’ll primarily use heuristics and experience to improve IA, navigation, interactions, UI patterns, and more.
• Helping build our design system from (almost) the ground up.

You may not want to apply if:

• You feel uncomfortable designing independently without much guidance from a PM or design management.
• You’re uncomfortable having your decisions and process constantly challenged by engineering and product teams.
• You prefer an in-person role over remote (Ashby operates remotely).
• You dislike written documentation.
• You want a set structure and rhythm to your projects (e.g., PM gives a brief, you create wireframes, then mocks, then hand off to engineers).
• You prefer a narrow job scope (e.g., interaction design only, design system only).

Interview process

Our interview process is designed to help you show your best self. We’ll dive into past projects and simulate working together to discuss decisions. The process includes four rounds, with optional casual Zoom coffee chats in between:

• 30-minute introduction call to discuss Ashby and your experience.
• 45-minute portfolio review.
• 75-minute design exercise and app teardown. This includes a live whiteboarding exercise where we provide a prompt and assess how you break down problems and propose solutions.
• 2.5-hour final round: Meet the team and repeat the portfolio review with a founder.

I’ll be your main point of contact and prepare you for interviews. You’ll also meet engineers and product managers, with plenty of time to ask questions. If we don’t extend an offer, I’ll provide feedback if you’d like.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.
• 10-year exercise window for stock options, allowing you to purchase options when financially comfortable.
• Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year.
• Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the U.S. (with plans to expand to other countries).
• Generous budget for equipment, software, and office furniture to support your productivity and comfort.
• $100/month education budget, with additional coverage for larger expenses like conferences (manager approval required).
• Top-notch health insurance for you and your dependents in the U.S., with all premiums covered by Ashby.

Pay

Compensation range: $150K - $210K.