Staff Design Engineer - UK in Ashby de la Zouch

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. 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. As a result, our UI isn’t a simple chatbox, but it can’t rely on a sea of knobs and dials either. It needs to feel approachable to someone using it for the first time while offering increasingly powerful ways to customize and automate their work.

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. While we appreciate the strive for perfection, we also realize it doesn’t need to be achieved all at once; instead, we iterate over time, often letting user feedback and business needs drive prioritisation.
• 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.
• 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 covers both Mid and Senior levels. You have 2+ years of continuous experience (e.g., 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 (This Posting) - We’re looking for folks who’ve practiced our flavour 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.

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 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. We want other functions and departments to be jealous of what TA teams can do with Ashby, and today they often are!

As we’ve set the standard for excellence in TA software, HR teams have pulled us into solving their problems in areas like onboarding and performance management.

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

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.

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). It’s a new level of ownership for many engineers, but we’d 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. 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.