Staff Design Engineer - Americas

About the Role

This role expects you to design and code. Design Engineer at Ashby isn't just a Frontend Engineer with new branding, nor is it a Designer vibe coding prototypes. Combining excellence in both is where magic happens. You'll work on our most challenging design problems, help others improve their designs by expanding and enhancing our in-house design system, and consult on bespoke design work needed by product engineers.

What Design Engineers at Ashby Have Done

• Redesigned our mobile web app by talking with customers who use it often, wireframing new flows, implementing its design system, and using that system to turn the wireframes into a polished UI.
• Built a set of flexible, composable components in our design system that allow other engineers to build beautiful, consistent setup wizards across our product easily.
• Helped a Product Engineer improve the information hierarchy and scannability of their design for viewing a candidate's assessments. Recruiters can quickly parse information and pick out anomalies.

Why Ashby Offers a Unique Opportunity

• You work on a product at scale, not at an early-stage startup struggling to find users and get feedback. Your work will touch over 100,000 weekly active users, millions of candidates per week, and notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake.
• You'll get to test out ideas with our own recruiting team and hiring managers who use Ashby every day, and often hear customer feedback as early as the day you release.
• This role has always had the commitment of both Benji (CEO & Co-Founder) and me: I've held the role, steadfastly championed it since we started hiring in 2020, and haven't diluted its responsibilities as we've grown (in fact, we've doubled down).
• You get to shape the UI and UX of a powerful and complex product. Our UI needs to feel approachable to someone using it for the first time while offering increasingly powerful ways to customize and automate their work.

Why You Shouldn't Apply

• You only want to work on design systems. While improving our design system is one of many responsibilities, you won't be able to work on it exclusively.
• You like to do extensive research and user testing before implementation. The beauty of being part-Engineer is that you can build conviction by shipping to a subset of users (including our own team) and gathering feedback.
• You want everything to be perfect before it gets into a user's hands. We ship fast and iterate over time, often letting user feedback and business needs drive prioritization.
• You don't have excellent taste and execution in visual design. Design Engineers set the bar for visual design in our app and continually improve it, pushing its boundaries with each new feature or redesign.
• You need company-driven process and structure to get your projects across the finish line. Sprint planning and well-defined project management processes are things you need or look to others to lead. You'd rather focus on the design and technical details.
• You only want to do exciting work. Customer issues and investigations are distributed across the team, including our high-level ICs.

Staff Design Engineer (This Posting)

We're looking for folks who've practiced our flavor of Design Engineering professionally. It may not be through a formal title, but you've made major contributions to a design system and designed and implemented features for hundreds of users and iterated on them through user feedback. Internally, we do not use these titles, but Engineers are leveled based on proficiency.

What We're Building

As engineers, we are used to tooling that makes us better at what we do. When we started Ashby, we saw the opposite with Talent Acquisition software. Recruiting teams were leveling up how they did their work, but instead of software meeting this new standard, it held them back. Scheduling a final round is an excellent example. Recruiting teams wanted to schedule candidates faster, track interviewer preparation and quality, and do it with half the headcount. A recruiter needed to manually collect availability from the candidate, identify qualified interviewers, perform "Calendar Tetris" to find who is available to interview the candidate, schedule on the earliest date possible, and make any last-minute adjustments as availability changed. They must do this while considering the interview load on each individual and whether interviewers need to be trained and shadowing others.

As hiring managers, we know TA is a critical function, and as engineers, we know software can do better. So, we built and continue to build Ashby to give TA teams the highest standard of tooling. Software that's intelligent and powerful. Software that provides insights into where they're failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they're underwater with. We want other functions and departments to be jealous of what TA teams can do with Ashby, and today they often are!

Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture is motivated by Benji's (my Co-founder and CEO) and my belief that a small, talented team, given the right environment, can build high-quality software fast (and work regular hours!). We do it through minimal process with ownership over decisions normally made by product and design, natural collaboration and deliberate communication, investing in tools and abstractions that give us leverage, and putting effort into building a diverse team.

Minimal Process & Lots of Ownership

The best engineers we've worked with delivered reliably magical outcomes. They took customer problems and relentlessly drove them to solutions that were not only successful but often brilliant and creative. While they did this with minimal oversight, stakeholders were never in the dark as to what was going on, and no setback was a surprise. Traditional product-development processes aren't meant for the best engineers. Their purpose is to create consistent outcomes regardless of the engineer's skill. But, consistency comes at the expense of an engineer's time and freedom—both ingredients necessary to generate those magical outcomes. As a result, process stifles the best engineers and doesn't give others the opportunity to practice the behaviors that made the best engineers the "best."

At Ashby, we want to build an environment that encourages every engineer to be their best. So, at Ashby, every Engineer runs their project. Product Managers (and Designers) build strategy, do customer research, and hand off problem briefs to Engineers. Engineers take on the rest: they research the problem, write product specs, build wireframes, and implement their solution end-to-end. We rely on engineers, not process, to push information outward to the relevant folks (e.g., Product Managers) and pull folks in to help (e.g., Designers, Infra). It's a new level of ownership for many engineers, but we'd rather an engineer fail a bit and coach up their skills than use process as a crutch. Not everyone succeeds in our culture, but those who do thrive.

Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate

Our engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind. These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally. We combine this with research, prototyping, and written proposals to see around corners and get feedback from the team across time zones. Focus time is something that we hold sacred, and, with thoughtful and deliberate communication, engineers are in

Today, 25% of engineers and 50% of our engineering leaders at Ashby are from underrepresented groups. We are taking conscious steps to improve, like sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, no leetcode interviews, and more. We also meet in person at least twice a year, once as a department and once as a company. You also have a small budget to meet up with folks in your city/region.

Increase Leverage, not Team Size

We built Ashby with the quality, breadth, and depth that many customers would expect from much larger teams over larger time scales. We've done this through investment in:

• Great developer tooling. Our CI/CD takes ~10m, and we deploy at least 15x a day. A debugger that works out of the box. Everyone on the team has contributed to our developer experience.
• Building blocks to create powerful and customizable products fast. At the core of Ashby is a set of common components (analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) that we constantly improve. Each improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app.
• AI-powered tooling. We think of AI as a way to automate the mundane parts of building and maintaining high-quality software. We use a combination of third-party and internally built tools that, for instance, auto-triage customer issues, suggest fixes, prototype ideas, generate production-ready code, and conduct code reviews. Engineers have an unlimited token budget (but are not measured on it).