Staff 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 recognize that design is required in varying degrees on each project. Sometimes, an engineer can reuse existing components following documentation, while other times, the designer effectively owns the project from beginning to end. This approach allows us to resist reversion to the mean and take down incumbents in multiple verticals.

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 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 no-red-tape culture of a seed-stage company.

What we’re building

Ashby provides talent teams with intelligent and powerful software to streamline hiring. 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 availability, identifying interviewers, performing "Calendar Tetris," and adjusting for changes—all while balancing interviewer load and training needs. Ashby automates or simplifies these tasks, offering insights into inefficiencies and designing products that are approachable for beginners but extendable for power users.

Responsibilities

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

Requirements

• 10+ years of product design experience, primarily in desktop SaaS.
• Able to take huge, ambiguous projects and break them down into actionable parts.
• Able to speak to patterns of high-functioning design teams and create an environment of high performance.
• Able to leverage designers' superpowers to influence engineering, product, and the rest of the company.
• Able to create standards and principles to improve design quality across the product org.
• Able to think from first principles instead of applying standard UX processes.
• Enough experience that your intuition can solve most usability problems without relying solely on data, metrics, or user research.
• Curious and resourceful enough to devise creative solutions and de-risk them appropriately.
• Best-in-class skills in layout, navigation, IA, UI, and interaction design.
• Obsession with craft and details.
• 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 a typical EPD product team structure—you won’t be a cog in the wheel.
• Working on all parts of a massive product surface area spanning many user types, jobs-to-be-done, and usability challenges.
• Helping reinvent the design model for modern enterprise software—no rigid wireframes, user journeys, or personas; focus on solving customer problems.
• Covering all parts of the design process with a focus on design craft, including occasional user research interviews.
• 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.
• 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 do wireframes, then mocks, then hand off to engineers).
• You prefer a narrow job scope (e.g., interaction design only, design system only).

Interview process

• 30-minute introduction call to discuss Ashby and your experience.
• 45-minute portfolio review.
• 75-minute design exercise and app teardown (live whiteboarding with a prompt).
• 2.5-hour final round: meet the team and repeat portfolio discussion with a founder.

You’ll meet engineers and product managers and have time to ask questions. If no offer is extended, feedback will be provided upon request.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.
• 10-year exercise window for stock options (no pressure to purchase if you leave).
• Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year.
• Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the U.S. (expanding to other countries as needed).
• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget.
• $100/month education budget, with additional coverage for conferences or larger expenses.
• Top-notch health insurance for you and your dependents in the U.S., with all premiums covered by Ashby.

Pay

Compensation range: $180K - $240K.