Staff Design Engineer - Americas

About the role

This role is close to my heart because, as someone who can both design and code, it’s where I’ve always done my best work. I want folks like me to feel at home at Ashby, and so I made Design Engineering a formal role and department that works closely with me. Our first hire was over five years ago, and we’re doubling the team from five to over ten in the next year.

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. When you put effort into both the design and technical implementation of a feature, you gain a nimbleness and creativity that’s hard to achieve when focusing on only one. For instance, the UX and UI you envision often influence the data model's design and flexibility, while understanding technology's capabilities can simplify or improve the design.

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.

To ground it with examples, Design Engineers at Ashby have:

• 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?

The Design Engineer role is more common today than five years ago, but Ashby offers a unique opportunity that few can match:

• Work on a product at scale: Your work will touch over 100,000 weekly active users, millions of candidates per week, and notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake.
• Rapid feedback: You’ll test ideas with our own recruiting team and hiring managers (like me) and often hear customer feedback as early as the day you release.
• Commitment from leadership: This role has always had the support of both Benji (CEO & Co-Founder) and me. I’ve held the role, championed it since we started hiring in 2020, and haven’t diluted its responsibilities as we’ve grown—in fact, we’ve doubled down.
• Shape a complex product: Our users need software that helps them move quickly while adapting to their unique workflows. Our UI must feel approachable to first-time users while offering increasingly powerful customization and automation.

Why You Shouldn’t Apply

Design Engineers come in many flavors, not all of which fit our model. Here are some reasons you might not enjoy the role:

• 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 prefer 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, 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 push its boundaries.
• You need company-driven process and structure to finish projects. Sprint planning and well-defined project management processes are things you rely on others to lead.
• You only want to do exciting work. We’re building a team of kind, collaborative folks. Customer issues and investigations are distributed across the team, including our high-level ICs.

Seniority/Level

We’ve posted levels from Junior to Staff. The higher the level, the more experience and alignment with the role we expect.

• Junior Design Engineer: 0–2 years of industry experience as a designer or engineer. We want to see projects (personal or professional) with at least a couple of users that showcase great visual taste and burgeoning talent in both UI/UX and Engineering.
• Design Engineer (Mid/Senior): 2+ years of continuous experience as an Engineer or Designer. You have good proficiency in both Design and Engineering, with exceptional proficiency in the discipline you practice full-time. We expect experience designing products and shipping code to hundreds of users (even if through side projects).
• Staff Design Engineer: You’ve practiced our flavor of Design Engineering professionally. You’ve made major contributions to a design system and designed and implemented features for hundreds of users, iterating on them through user feedback.

What We’re Building

As engineers, we’re 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 their work, but the software held them back. For example:

• Scheduling a final round required recruiters to manually collect availability, identify qualified interviewers, perform “Calendar Tetris,” and make last-minute adjustments—all while balancing interviewer load and training needs.

We built Ashby to give TA teams intelligent, powerful software that provides insights, automates tasks, and simplifies workflows. We want other 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 the 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: Engineers run their projects end-to-end. Product Managers and Designers build strategy and hand off problem briefs, but Engineers research, spec, wireframe, and implement solutions. We rely on engineers to push information outward and pull in help when needed.
• Natural collaboration and deliberate communication: Our team consists of humble, kind, lifelong learners. We combine research, prototyping, and written proposals to see around corners and get feedback across time zones. Focus time is sacred, and engineers are in <2h of meetings per week.
• Investing in leverage: We’ve built Ashby with the quality and depth customers expect from much larger teams. We do this through:
  • Great developer tooling: CI/CD takes ~10m, and we deploy at least 15x a day. Our debugger works out of the box, and everyone contributes to developer experience.
  • Building blocks: At the core of Ashby is a set of common components (analytics modeling, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) that we constantly improve. Each improvement cascades throughout the app.
  • AI-powered tooling: We use AI to automate mundane tasks like auto-triaging customer issues, suggesting fixes, prototyping, generating production-ready code, and conducting code reviews. Engineers have an unlimited token budget.

Today, 25% of engineers and 50% of our engineering leaders at Ashby are from underrepresented groups. We’re taking steps to improve, like sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, and avoiding leetcode interviews. We meet in person at least twice a year and have a small budget for regional meetups.