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 believe design should be integrated throughout the entire project lifecycle. This means you may act as a designer, product manager, or consultant depending on the project's needs. Our founders deeply value design, but believe it should be collectively owned by the product team rather than siloed within a design department. Your role will involve equipping the entire team to make better design decisions while tackling the biggest design challenges yourself.

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'll experience the scale of a growth-stage startup with the agency and minimal bureaucracy of an early-stage company.

What we’re building

Ashby provides intelligent and powerful software for talent teams to streamline hiring processes. Recruiters perform thousands of daily tasks to coordinate between candidates, interviewers, and hiring managers—scheduling interviews alone involves complex "Calendar Tetris" to balance availability, interviewer load, and training needs. Our products are designed to be approachable for beginners while offering depth for power users, often replacing spreadsheets as the tool of choice.

Responsibilities

• Consult for engineers on layout, typography, flows, and other design challenges.
• Investigate problems by engaging with GTM teams, customers, and data to form confident design proposals.
• Use Figma to create visual artifacts for stakeholder alignment.
• Write specification docs ("specs") to detail design proposals and drive stakeholder alignment.
• Own larger product features, considering Jobs-To-Be-Done, navigation, information architecture, layout, and interaction design.
• 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 break down huge, ambiguous projects into actionable parts.
• Experience speaking to patterns of high-functioning design teams and creating environments of high performance.
• Able to leverage design superpowers to influence engineering, product, and the broader company.
• Skilled in creating standards and principles to improve design quality across the product organization.
• Thinks from first principles rather than relying solely on standard UX processes.
• Intuition-driven problem-solving for most usability issues, with minimal reliance on data or user research.
• Curious and resourceful, capable of devising creative solutions and de-risking them appropriately.
• Best-in-class skills in layout, navigation, information architecture, 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 apply

• Create leverage and impact far beyond typical EPD (Engineering, Product, Design) team structures—you won’t be a small cog in a large wheel.
• Work across a massive product surface area, spanning multiple user types, Jobs-To-Be-Done, and usability challenges. You won’t be stuck on one problem for years.
• Help reinvent the design model for modern enterprise software. Focus on solving customer problems rather than adhering to rigid processes like wireframes or personas.
• Cover all parts of the design process with a focus on craft, including occasional user research interviews, but primarily using heuristics and experience to improve IA, navigation, interactions, and UI patterns.
• Contribute to building our design system from the ground up.

Why you may not want to apply

• You prefer designing with significant guidance from a product manager or design management.
• You’re uncomfortable with your decisions and processes being constantly challenged by engineering and product teams.
• You prefer an in-person role (Ashby is fully remote).
• You dislike written documentation.
• You want a set structure and rhythm to your projects (e.g., PM briefs, wireframes, mocks, handoff to engineers).
• You prefer a narrow job scope (e.g., interaction design only or 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, including a live whiteboarding exercise where you’ll break down problems and propose solutions.
• 2.5-hour final round: meet the team and repeat portfolio discussion with a founder.

You’ll be prepared for each interview and have opportunities to ask questions of engineers and product managers. If an offer isn’t extended, feedback will be provided upon request.

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 internationally).
• Generous budget for equipment, software, and office furniture.
• $100/month education budget, with additional funding available 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.