Staff Design Engineer at Ashby - Career Growth Role in Columbus

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, so recruiters can quickly parse information and pick out anomalies.

The Design Engineer role is more common today than five years ago, but Ashby offers a unique opportunity that few can match:

• You work on a product at scale — 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, 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 — our UI must feel approachable to first-time users while offering increasingly powerful ways to customize and automate their work.

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. We iterate over time, often letting user feedback and business needs drive prioritization.

• 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 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 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 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

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.

Scheduling a final round is an excellent example. Recruiting teams wanted to schedule candidates faster, track interviewer preparation and quality, and do it with half the headcount. A recruiter needed to manually collect availability from the candidate, identify qualified interviewers, perform "Calendar Tetris" to find who is available to interview the candidate, schedule on the earliest date possible, and make any last-minute adjustments as availability changed — all while considering interview load and whether interviewers need to be trained and shadowing others. TA software didn't help.

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, that provides insights into where they're failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they're underwater with. 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 the 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. We rely on engineers, not process, to push information outward and pull folks in to help. 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 (meet them here!). 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 we hold sacred — with thoughtful and deliberate communication, engineers are in <2h meetings per week (read more here).

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've built Ashby with the quality, breadth, and depth that many customers would expect from much larger teams. We've done this through investment in:

• Great developer tooling. Our CI/CD takes ~10 minutes, and we deploy at least 15x a day. A debugger that works out of the box. Everyone on the team has contributed to our developer experience.

• 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 cascades throughout our app.

• 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 auto-triage customer issues, suggest fixes, prototype ideas, generate production-ready code, and conduct code reviews. Engineers have an unlimited token budget. We write in detail about our philosophy and use of AI here.

Put Effort into Diversity

Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. 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.

Work-Life Balance: It's A Marathon, Not a Sprint

The intensity of work at Ashby should feel like a marathon, not a sprint. We work with urgency and ambition to build excellent software, but we don't need to prove out a new software category or product-market fit. Our remote, low-meeting, high-ownership culture gives you a lot of flexibility in how you structure your days and weeks. You keep your own hours, but there will be moments of intensity, like launching your feature at our annual user conference.

We offer unlimited PTO, and you actually get to use it — some of our most exceptional engineers take almost 30 days of vacation per year. This way of working allows many of us on the team to be active parents, including Benji and me.

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 Abhik (30m, live). Be prepared to screen-share examples of your work.

• A second round: either 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 not done in the second round — technical screen or design take-home. (3h, live)

Depending on our leadership team's bandwidth, we may start with an additional 30-minute screen with a recruiter. Each round will have written guidance so you know what to expect. You'll meet 3–4 people in Design Engineering. If we don't give an offer, we'll provide feedback.

Your First Three Months 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 — from simple copy changes to the delivery of a prominent, impactful feature. Your manager will do 30, 60, and 90-day reviews. You'll have a peer paired with you to answer questions, pair program, and check in often.

Technology Stack

Our tech stack is TypeScript (frontend & backend), React, GraphQL API, Node.js, Postgres, and Redis. 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.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.

• 10-year exercise window for stock options. You shouldn't feel pressure to purchase stock options if you leave Ashby — do it when you feel financially comfortable.

• Unlimited PTO, and we will encourage you to take it.

• A minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, covered by Ashby. For folks outside the US, it may be longer to be in line with regional requirements.

• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. Get what you need to be happy and productive!

• $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.

• $250/month tool budget plus access to Claude, Cursor, and Codex with generous token budgets.

• 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.

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.

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.

Ashby is committed to a fair and transparent hiring process. We confirm that this advertisement is for an active, existing vacancy within our organization. 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.