DESIGN ENGINEERING H/F

Hi I’m Abhik , Ashby's Co-Founder and VP of Engineering. 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, but also where I was seen as a rebel and an outsider. 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. This role truly expects you to design and code. Design Engineer at Ashby isn’t just a Frontend Engineer with new branding, nor is it a Designer vibe coding prototypes. I found that when I put my best effort into both the design and technical implementation of a feature, I had a nimbleness and creativity that was hard to achieve when I did only one or the other. For instance, the UX and UI I envisioned often influenced the data model's design and flexibility, while the understanding of technology's capabilities often simplified or improved 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. The Design Engineer role is more common today than five years ago, but I believe Ashby offers a unique opportunity that few can match:
You work on a product at scale, not at an early-stage startup struggling to find users and get feedback on what you’ve designed and built. At Ashby, your work will touch over 100,000 weekly active users, millions of candidates per week, and notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. You’ll get to test out ideas with our own recruiting team and hiring managers who use Ashby every day (like me), and often hear customer feedback as early as the day you release.
You get to shape the UI and UX of a powerful and complex product. Our users need software that helps them move quickly while adapting to their unique workflows and preferences. Design Engineers come in many flavors, not all of which fit our model. 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 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!
One of the drivers of our success is that we ship fast . You don’t 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. You’d rather focus on the design and technical details.
We’re building a team of kind, collaborative folks. Customer issues and investigations are distributed across the team, including our high-level ICs.

Junior Design Engineer (This Posting) - 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 covers both Mid and Senior levels. internships don’t 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 you’re coming from, we expect experience designing products and shipping code to hundreds of users (even if through side projects).
Staff Design Engineer - We’re looking for folks who’ve practiced our flavor of Design Engineering professionally. It may not be through a formal title, but you’ve 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 We’re Building
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.
Recruiting teams wanted to schedule candidates faster, track interviewer preparation and quality, and do it with half the headcount. TA software didn’t help.
As hiring managers, we know TA is a critical function, and as engineers, we know software can do better. Software that’s intelligent and powerful. Software that provides insights into where they’re failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they’re underwater with. Our engineering culture is motivated by Benji’s (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!). Minimal process with ownership over decisions normally made by product and design
Putting effort into building a diverse team

They took customer problems and relentlessly drove them to solutions that were not only successful but often brilliant and creative. So, at Ashby, every Engineer runs their project. Product Managers (and Designers) build strategy, do customer research, and hand off problem briefs to Engineers. Product Managers) and pull folks in to help (e.g., These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally. We built Ashby with the quality, breadth, and depth that many customers would expect from much larger teams over larger time scales. 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. We write in detail about our philosophy, current use of AI, and future plans for AI in Engineering here .
And a demo of one of these building blocks:
Put Effort into Diversity
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.
We are taking conscious steps to improve, like sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, no leetcode interviews, and more.

At Ashby, our team and interview process want to help you show your best self. We’ll dive into past projects and simulate working together through pair programming, designing, writing design system specs collaboratively, and discussing decisions. 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 didn’t do in the second round: technical screen or design take-home. (You’ll meet 3-4 people in Design Engineering (with 5-15 minutes in each interview to ask them questions). 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. you’ll 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 Stack
Our tech stack is TypeScript (frontend & backend), React, GraphQL API, Node.js, Postgres, and Redis. Depending on the level you’re applying for and your past experience, we expect, at a minimum, good proficiency with TypeScript, React, and CSS. Proficiency with backend technologies is a plus, as it allows you to work without coordinating with Product Engineers.

Competitive salary and equity.
~A minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, covered by Ashby. Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. If you’re in the US, we offer top-tier health insurance for you and your dependents, with 100% of premiums covered by Ashby. In other countries, we provide high-quality supplemental health insurance for you and your dependents, also fully covered by us.

We’re being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. Please be advised that we may use artificial intelligence-driven tools to assist our recruitment team in screening, assessing, and selecting candidates for this position.