Staff Design Engineer - UK

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. 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.

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.

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 flavours, 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. Customer issues and investigations are distributed across the team.

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.
• Design Engineer - This posting covers both Mid and Senior levels. You have 2+ years of continuous experience as an Engineer or a Designer.
• Staff Design Engineer - We’re looking for folks who’ve practiced our flavor of Design Engineering professionally.

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.

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. We do it through minimal process with ownership over decisions normally made by product and design, natural collaboration and deliberate communication, and investing in tools and abstractions that give us leverage.

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.

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.

Benefits: Competitive salary and equity, unlimited PTO, a minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, generous equipment budget, and top-tier health insurance.

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.