Design Engineer, UK

Overview

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. Our first hire was over five years ago, and we’re doubling the team from five to over ten in the next year.

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. Combining excellence in both is where magic happens. 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. This role embraces that.

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. Recruiters can quickly parse information and pick out anomalies.

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.
• This role has always had the commitment of both Benji (CEO & Co-Founder) and me: I’ve held the role, steadfastly championed it since we started hiring in 2020, and haven’t diluted its responsibilities as we’ve grown (in fact, we’ve doubled down).
• 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.

Why You Shouldn’t 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 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!
• You want everything to be perfect before it gets into a user’s hands. 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.
• You need company-driven process and structure to get your projects across the finish line.
• You only want to do exciting work. We’re 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

We’ve 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 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.

What We’re 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.

So, we built and continue to build Ashby to give TA teams the highest standard of tooling. 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.

Engineering Culture

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!). 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

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.

Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate

Our engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind. Focus time is something that we hold sacred, and, with thoughtful and deliberate communication, engineers are in <2h meetings per week.

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. We’ve done this through investment in:

• Great developer tooling. Our CI/CD takes ~10m, and we deploy at least 15x a day.
• 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.
• AI-powered tooling. We think of AI as a way to automate the mundane parts of building and maintaining high-quality software. Engineers have an unlimited token budget.

Put Effort into Diversity

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. We’ll 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 didn’t do in the second round: technical screen or design take-home. (3h, live)

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.

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.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.
• 10-year exercise window for stock options.
• Unlimited PTO, and we will encourage you to take it.
• A minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, covered by Ashby.
• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget.
• $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.
• Top-tier health insurance for you and your dependents (US), or high-quality supplemental health insurance fully covered by Ashby (other countries).

Tagged as: AI, GraphQL, junior, mid-level, node, node.js, PostgreSQL, React, senior, Typescript