Staff Design Engineer, UK in London

Hi I’m Abhik, Ashby’s Co-Founder and VP of Engineering. As someone who could design and build software, this position is close to my heart. I always felt I had a unique perspective because I could play with design ideas and iterate in code. My prototypes used actual logic and data. My changes cascaded throughout the app for comprehensive critique (thanks, React component system!). But, every company made me pick one — I couldn’t design and build. At Ashby, you can.

What You’ll Tackle

• 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 build custom autocompletes.
• Helped another engineer improve their design's information hierarchy and scannability for viewing a candidate’s assessments.

These projects reflect what we’re accomplishing at Ashby: improving the productivity of working professionals (starting with talent teams) with intelligent and powerful software. We put a lot of effort into designing products that are approachable to beginners but mastered and extended by power users. In many ways, spreadsheets set the bar here. We have notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. Our growth and retention metrics are best-in-class among our peers: we have tens of millions in ARR, growing >100% year over year, over 2500 customers, very low churn, and many years of runway.

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

The best engineers we’ve 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. Collaboration is natural and communication is deliberate. Our engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind. 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 sacred, and, with thoughtful and deliberate communication, engineers are in 2h meetings per week. To drive it home, here’s a recent calendar of an engineer who has been with us for over 4 years. 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.
• A debugger that works out of the box.
• Building blocks to create powerful and customizable products fast.

At the core of Ashby is a set of common components that we constantly improve. Each improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app. And a demo of one of these building blocks. Here’s an impromptu quote from Arjun in our company Slack of what it’s like to build a feature at Ashby: Put effort into diversity. Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Today, 21% of engineers 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 help you show your best self. We’ll dive into past projects and simulate working together via pair programming, writing product and tech specs collaboratively, and talking through decisions. There are no leetcode or whiteboard exercises. Our interview process is three rounds:

• Introduction call with Hiring Manager (15 to 30 minutes, live)
• A technical screen where we pair in our actual codebase (1 hour, live)
• Three non-coding interviews that focus on product thinking, technical design, and infrastructure (3 hours 15 minutes, live, can be split across multiple days)

Depending on leadership bandwidth, we may start with an additional 30 minute screen with a recruiter. Your hiring manager will be your main point of contact and will prep you for interviews. Each round will have written guidance so you know what to expect (minimal preparation). You’ll meet 4 to 6 people in engineering and have 5-15 minutes in each interview to ask questions. If we don’t give an offer, we’ll provide feedback.

Your First Three Months at Ashby

We want an exceptional onboarding experience for every new hire. 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 calibrate how we work together. 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

I’m sharing our tech stack with the caveat that we don’t require previous experience in it (but a love of typed languages is helpful): TypeScript (frontend & backend), React, GraphQL API, Node.js, Postgres, Redis. When they joined Ashby, many of our engineers switched from other languages like Swift and Kotlin. We care more about fundamentals and how fast you learn. For folks on the team who switched, it's nice seeing changes hot reload versus waiting for XCode to compile.

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 covered with manager approval.
• If you’re in the US, we offer top-tier health insurance for you and your dependents, with 100% of premiums covered by Ashby.

Ashby’s success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. We’re being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. I hope that excites you enough to apply. 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. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.

Compensation Range: £138K - £224K