Design Engineer

Hi! We're Ashby

As Ashby's Co-Founder and VP of Engineering, I'm Abhik, and the Design Engineer role is close to my heart. I've always felt a unique perspective from being able to design and iterate in code. My ideas would start in Figma but then be grounded or even more creative in code, using actual logic and data for prototypes. My changes would cascade throughout the app for comprehensive critique, thanks to our React component system. Traditionally, companies made me choose between designing and building, but at Ashby, you can do both.

While every engineer at Ashby can design and build, as a Design Engineer, you'll tackle our most challenging design problems. You'll also help others improve their designs by expanding and enhancing our in-house design system and consulting on bespoke work. To illustrate, Design Engineers at Ashby have:

• Redesigned our mobile web app by engaging with customers, wireframing new flows, implementing its design system, and bringing those wireframes to life.
• Built a set of flexible, composable components within our design system, empowering other engineers to create custom autocompletes that include filters, options for new record creation, and more.
• Assisted another engineer in refining their design's information hierarchy and scannability for viewing candidate assessments, enabling recruiters to quickly parse information and identify anomalies.

These projects exemplify Ashby's mission: enhancing the productivity of working professionals, starting with talent teams, through intelligent and powerful software. We meticulously design products that are intuitive for beginners yet capable of being mastered and extended by power users. In many ways, spreadsheets set the benchmark for this philosophy.

We proudly serve notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. Our growth and retention metrics are industry-leading: we boast tens of millions in ARR, growing over 100% year-over-year, serve more than 2500 customers, maintain very low churn, and possess many years of runway. We'll share more details when we meet, but you likely now understand why we're hiring for this role.

What We’re Building

As engineers, we're accustomed to tooling that amplifies our capabilities. When we founded Ashby, we observed the opposite in Talent Acquisition software. While recruiting teams were advancing their methods, the existing software often hindered their progress rather than supporting it.

Scheduling a final round interview is a prime example. Recruiting teams aimed to schedule candidates faster, monitor interviewer preparation and quality, and achieve this with half the headcount. Recruiters manually gathered candidate availability, identified qualified interviewers, played 'Calendar Tetris' to find available interviewers, scheduled on the earliest possible date, and made last-minute adjustments as availability shifted. All this while balancing individual interview loads and considering training or shadowing needs for interviewers. Traditional TA software offered no real assistance.

As hiring managers, we recognize TA as a critical function, and as engineers, we know software can do better. This conviction led us to build Ashby, and we continue to evolve it to provide TA teams with the highest standard of intelligent and powerful tooling. Our software offers insights into areas of failure and automates or simplifies numerous overwhelming tasks. Our goal is for other functions and departments to envy what TA teams accomplish with Ashby, and today, they often do!

Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture is rooted in the belief, shared by my Co-founder and CEO Benji and me, that a small, talented team, given the right environment, can build high-quality software quickly and maintain regular hours. We achieve this through:

• Minimal process with significant ownership over decisions typically made by product and design.
• Natural collaboration fostered by deliberate communication.
• Strategic investment in tools and abstractions that provide leverage.
• Dedicated effort toward building a diverse team.

Minimal Process & Lots of Ownership

The best engineers we've encountered consistently delivered extraordinary outcomes. They adeptly transformed customer problems into successful, often brilliant and creative solutions. While operating with minimal oversight, stakeholders were always informed, and unforeseen setbacks were rare. Traditional product development processes are designed for consistency, regardless of an engineer's skill, which often comes at the cost of time and freedom – essential for generating those 'magical' outcomes. Such processes can stifle top engineers and deprive others of the opportunity to develop best-in-class behaviors.

At Ashby, we strive to cultivate an environment where every engineer can excel. Consequently, every engineer manages their own project. Product Managers and Designers establish strategy, conduct customer research, and deliver problem briefs. Engineers then take on the rest: researching the problem, writing product specifications, building wireframes, and implementing their solution end-to-end. We rely on engineers, not process, to proactively share information with relevant stakeholders (e.g., Product Managers) and enlist help from others (e.g., Designers, Infra). This level of ownership is new for many engineers, but we prefer to coach and develop skills rather than use process as a crutch. While not everyone thrives in our culture, those who do flourish.

Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate

Our engineering team comprises lifelong learners who are not only talented but also humble and kind. These qualities foster a naturally collaborative environment. We combine this with research, prototyping, and written proposals to anticipate challenges and gather feedback across time zones. We hold focus time sacred, and with thoughtful, deliberate communication, engineers typically spend less than 2 hours in meetings per week. We also meet in person at least twice a year, once as a department and once as a company. Additionally, you receive a small budget to meet colleagues in your city or region.

Increase Leverage, not Team Size

We've built Ashby with a quality, breadth, and depth that many customers expect from much larger teams and over longer timeframes. This has been achieved through investment in:

• Excellent developer tooling: Our CI/CD takes approximately 10 minutes, and we deploy at least 15 times a day. We also have an out-of-the-box debugger. Every team member has contributed to our developer experience.
• Building blocks for rapid creation of powerful and customizable products: At Ashby's core is a suite of common components (analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) that we continuously enhance. Each improvement to a common component seamlessly cascades throughout our application.

Put Effort into Diversity

Diverse teams drive innovation and superior outcomes. Having witnessed my mother and partner build careers as minority women in non-diverse fields, I am committed to ensuring Ashby creates opportunities for the next generation of engineers from underrepresented groups. Currently, 21% of engineers at Ashby are from underrepresented groups. While this isn't ideal, we are taking conscious steps to improve, including sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, and avoiding leetcode interviews, among other initiatives.

Interview Process

At Ashby, our team and interview process are designed to help you showcase your best self. We'll delve into past projects and simulate collaborative work through pair programming, joint product and tech spec writing, and discussions about decisions. There are no leetcode or whiteboard exercises.

Our interview process consists of three rounds:

• An introductory call with the Hiring Manager (15 to 30 minutes, live).
• A technical screen involving pair programming in our actual codebase (1 hour, live).
• Three non-coding interviews focusing on product thinking, technical design, and infrastructure (3 hours 15 minutes, live, can be split across multiple days).

Depending on our leadership team's bandwidth, we might begin with an additional 30-minute screen with a recruiter. Your hiring manager will be your primary contact and will prepare you for interviews. Each round will have written guidance, so you'll know what to expect with minimal preparation. You'll meet 4 to 6 engineers, with 5-15 minutes in each interview allocated for your questions. If an offer is not extended, we'll provide feedback.

Your First Three Months at Ashby

We are dedicated to providing an exceptional onboarding experience. At Ashby, your development environment is set up with a single script, you push your first product change on day one, and you spend the remainder of your time shipping product changes that introduce you to our codebase and best practices. These product changes progressively increase in scope and ambiguity, from simple copy edits to the delivery of a prominent, impactful feature. Your manager will conduct 30, 60, and 90-day reviews to offer feedback and align on our collaborative approach.

Successful onboarding is a team effort; you'll be paired with a peer who will answer questions, pair program with you, and regularly check in to offer assistance. The rest of the team will conduct training sessions on our culture, product, engineering process, and technical architecture.

Technology Stack

I'm sharing our tech stack with the understanding that prior experience isn't required, though an affinity for typed languages is beneficial. Our stack includes: TypeScript (frontend & backend), React, GraphQL API, Node.js, Postgres, and Redis. Many of our engineers transitioned from other languages like Swift and Kotlin, and platforms like iOS and Windows, when joining Ashby. We prioritize fundamental skills such as debugging and abstractions, as well as your learning agility. For those who made the switch, the immediate hot-reloading of changes is a welcome contrast to waiting for XCode to compile!

Benefits

Ashby offers a comprehensive benefits package:

• Competitive salary and equity.
• A 10-year exercise window for stock options, removing pressure to purchase upon leaving and allowing you to do so when financially comfortable.
• Unlimited PTO, with active encouragement to utilize it.
• A minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, covered by Ashby (potentially longer for non-US regions to align with local requirements).
• Generous budget for equipment, software, and office furniture to ensure your happiness and productivity.
• $100/month education budget, with more significant items like conferences covered upon manager approval.
• For US-based employees, top-tier health insurance for you and your dependents, with 100% of premiums covered by Ashby. For employees in other countries, high-quality supplemental health insurance for you and your dependents is also fully covered by us.

Ashby's success is contingent on hiring exceptional people and cultivating an environment where we are happy, challenged, and can perform our best work. We are deliberately building this environment from the ground up, and I hope this 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.

Key skills/competency

• Product Design
• UI/UX Design
• Front-end Development
• React.js
• TypeScript
• GraphQL
• Node.js
• PostgreSQL
• Design Systems
• Prototyping