Design Engineer, Americas

In this role, you9ll 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 it to make the wireframes a reality.
• Built a set of flexible, composable components in our design system that allow other engineers to easily build beautiful, consistent setup wizards across our product.
• Helped a Product Engineer improve the information hierarchy and scannability of their design for viewing a candidate9s assessments. Recruiters can quickly parse information and pick out anomalies.

Why You Shouldn9t 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 won9t 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 user9s hands. One of the drivers of our success is that we ship fast. That often means we don9t agonize over every detail and instead iterate over time, often letting user feedback and business needs drive prioritization.
• You don9t 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. You9d rather focus on the design and technical details.
• You only want to do exciting work. We9re building a team of kind, collaborative folks. Customer issues and investigations are distributed across the team, including our high-level ICs.

What Seniority/Level To Apply For

We9ve posted levels from Junior to Staff. The higher the level, the more experience and alignment with the role we expect when reviewing your application and while interviewing. Please apply to the one that sets the right expectations.

• Junior Design Engineer -You should have no more than 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 (This Posting) - This posting covers both Mid and Senior levels. You have 2+ years of continuous experience (e.g., internships don9t count) as an Engineer or a Designer. You have good proficiency in both Design and Engineering, with exceptional proficiency in the discipline you practice full-time. Regardless of which discipline you9re coming from, we expect experience designing products and shipping code to hundreds of users (even if through side projects).
• Staff Design Engineer - We9re looking for folks who9ve practiced our flavor of Design Engineering professionally. It may not be through a formal title, but you9ve 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 (which you can read about here).

What We9re 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 4Calendar Tetris4 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. TA software didn9t help.

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 that9s intelligent and powerful. Software that provides insights into where they9re failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they9re 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 Benji9s (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
• Putting effort into building a diverse team

Minimal Process & Lots of Ownership

The best engineers we9ve 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 aren9t meant for the best engineers. Their purpose is to create consistent outcomes regardless of the engineer9s skill. But, consistency comes at the expense of an engineer9s time and freedom-both ingredients necessary to generate those magical outcomes. As a result, process stifles the best engineers and doesn9t give others the opportunity to practice the behaviors that made the best engineers the 4best.4

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). It9s a new level of ownership for many engineers, but we9d 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 (meet them here!). 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. We9ve 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 (short video below).
• 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). We write in detail about our philosophy, current use of AI, and future plans for AI in Engineering here.

Here9s an impromptu quote from Arjun in our company Slack of what it9s like to build a feature at Ashby:

And a demo of one of these building blocks:

Put Effort into Diversity

Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Having seen my mother and partner build their careers as minority women in non-diverse fields, I want to make sure Ashby creates opportunities for the next generation of engineers from underrepresented groups.

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.

Interview Process

At Ashby, our team and interview process want to help you show your best self. We9ll dive into past projects and simulate working together through pair programming, designing, writing design system specs collaboratively, and discussing decisions. There are no leetcode or whiteboard exercises.

Our interview process is three rounds:

• Introduction call with me (30m, live). Be prepared to screen-share examples of your work.
• A second round where we either do a technical screen (1h, live) or a design take-home (~3h async, 30m live)
• Three interviews, a deep dive into a past design system or design project, a design system interview, and the interview we didn9t do in the second round: technical screen or design take-home. (3h, live)

Depending on our leadership team9s bandwidth, we may start with an additional 30m screen with a recruiter.

I will be your main point of contact and prep you for interviews. Each round will have written guidance so you know what to expect. You9ll meet 3-4 people in Design Engineering (with 5-15 minutes in each interview to ask them questions). If we don9t give an offer, we9ll provide feedback!

Your First Three Months at Ashby

We want an exceptional onboarding experience for every new hire. At Ashby, your dev environment is set up with a single script, you push your first product change on day one, and you spend the rest of your time shipping product changes that give you a tour of our codebase and best practices. The product changes increase in scope and ambiguity from simple copy changes to the delivery of a prominent, impactful feature. Your manager will do a 30, 60, and 90-day review to give feedback and calibrate on how we work together.

It9s a team effort to get you successfully onboarded; you9ll have a peer paired with you to answer questions, pair program, and check in often to see if you need help. The rest of the team will run training sessions on our culture, product, engineering process, and technical architecture.

Technology S