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. Instead of a traditional structure where a product manager briefs a designer who then hands 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 may effectively act as the product manager, owning a project from beginning to end. This approach allows us to resist reversion to the mean and has enabled Ashby to 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 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 no-red-tape culture of a seed-stage company.

What we’re building

Ashby provides talent teams with intelligent and powerful software to help them build a hiring process that identifies great candidates, moves them quickly through interviews, and provides an excellent candidate experience. 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 last-minute changes—all while balancing interviewer load and training needs.

We design products that are approachable for beginners but mastered and extended by power users, often replacing spreadsheets as the gold standard.

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 align stakeholders on key decisions.
• Take ownership of larger product features, thinking through Jobs-To-Be-Done, navigation, information architecture, layout, and interaction.
• Incorporate customer feedback and heuristics to build a usability backlog and propose projects for engineers.
• Consolidate and refine our design system to be 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 how to 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 come up with 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 apply

• Create 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.
• Work on all parts of a massive product surface area spanning many user types, JTBDs, 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, not just building wireframes or personas.
• Cover all parts of the design process with a focus on design craft, using heuristics and experience to improve IA, navigation, interactions, and UI patterns.
• Help build our design system from (almost) the ground up.

Why you may not want to apply

• 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 exercise with a prompt).
• 2.5-hour final round: meet the team + portfolio repeat with a founder.

You’ll meet engineers and product managers and have time to ask questions. If we don’t extend an offer, 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 Ashby.
• 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 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 (U.S. employees, premiums fully covered).

Pay

Compensation range: $180K - $240K.