Engineer Who Can Design

Engineer Who Can Design at Ashby

I'm Abhik, Ashby's Co-Founder and VP of Engineering, and this position is deeply meaningful to me. The ability to both design and build software offers a unique perspective, allowing ideas to evolve from Figma prototypes to grounded (or even more creative) code, incorporating actual logic and data. At Ashby, we empower engineers to combine these crucial skills, unlike many companies that force a choice.

As an Engineer Who Can Design, you will tackle Ashby's most challenging design problems and elevate the design capabilities of others. This involves expanding and enhancing our in-house design system and providing expert consultation on bespoke projects. Our engineers have:

• Redesigned our mobile web app by collaborating with frequent users, wireframing new flows, implementing our design system, and bringing these wireframes to life.
• Developed a suite of flexible, composable components for our design system, enabling other engineers to create custom autocompletes with advanced features like filters and new record creation.
• Guided fellow engineers in improving the information hierarchy and scannability of candidate assessment views, ensuring recruiters can quickly analyze data and identify anomalies.

These initiatives align with Ashby's core mission: enhancing the productivity of professionals, starting with talent acquisition teams, through intelligent and powerful software. We strive to design products that are intuitive for new users yet extensible and masterable by power users, setting a high bar comparable to the versatility of spreadsheets.

Ashby is experiencing significant customer growth and revenue, boasts years of runway, and is backed by esteemed investors like YCombinator, Elad Gil, and Lachy Groom. Further details will be shared during our discussions.

This is a staff-level role, requiring a minimum of 5 years of experience as a full-time frontend engineer or a balanced split between frontend development and design, with substantial contributions to (or leadership of) design systems.

Engineering Culture at Ashby

Our engineering culture is rooted in the belief, shared by Benji (my co-founder and CEO) and me, that a small, talented team, given the right environment, can rapidly build high-quality software while maintaining regular working hours.

Collaboration and Communication

The Ashby engineering team, and the company as a whole, comprises lifelong learners who are humble and kind. These qualities foster an environment where collaboration thrives naturally. We complement this with thorough research, prototyping, and written proposals to anticipate challenges and gather feedback across different time zones. We prioritize and protect focus time, and through thoughtful, deliberate communication, engineers spend less than 4 hours per week in meetings.

Increase Leverage, Not Team Size

Ashby has been built with a level of quality, breadth, and depth that many customers would expect from much larger teams over longer periods. This achievement stems from our investment in:

• Exceptional developer tooling: Our CI/CD pipeline completes in approximately 10 minutes, and we deploy at least 10 times a day. Every engineer on the team contributes to improving the developer experience.
• Robust building blocks: At Ashby's core is a set of common components (including an analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, and design system) that we continuously enhance. Improvements to these common components cascade throughout our application.

Ownership and Autonomy

As engineers, we excel at innovative problem-solving, especially when we deeply understand the challenge at hand. Benji and I performed our best engineering work when we had a profound grasp of the end-user and business context, coupled with ownership over the solution. Our engineering culture mirrors this experience: engineers at Ashby own projects from end-to-end, encompassing user engagement, product specification, and UX design. These are skills often underutilized by engineers, and at Ashby, we provide mentorship and team support to foster their growth.

Commitment to Diversity

Diverse teams are catalysts for innovation and superior outcomes. Witnessing my mother and partner navigate their 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, 26% of Ashby engineers are from underrepresented groups. While this is a start, we are actively implementing measures to improve, such as targeted candidate sourcing, generous paid family leave, and avoiding Leetcode-style interviews.

Our Interview Process

At Ashby, our team and interview process are designed to help you showcase your best self. We delve into past projects and simulate collaborative work through pair programming, joint tech spec writing, and decision discussions (we do not use Leetcode or whiteboard exercises). Our interview process consists of three main rounds, interspersed with casual Zoom (or in-person) coffee chats to foster mutual understanding:

• A 30-minute introductory call to discuss Ashby and your past work, including a demo of Ashby.
• A technical screen, which can be a take-home assignment or, for experienced candidates who prefer it, a 90-minute live session.
• A virtual on-site interview spanning 3 hours and 45 minutes, which can be split across two days.

Your hiring manager will be your primary contact, providing comprehensive preparation for your interviews. You will meet with engineering leaders and 4 to 6 engineers, with 15 minutes in each interview dedicated to your questions. We are committed to providing feedback to all candidates, even if an offer is not extended.

Your First Two Months at Ashby

We are dedicated to providing an exceptional onboarding experience for every new hire. At Ashby, your development environment is set up with a single script, allowing you to push your first change on day one. The subsequent time is dedicated to building your confidence in our codebase and practices, culminating in the delivery of a prominent, impactful feature. You'll be paired with a peer who will guide you through initial tasks and serve as a reliable resource for questions and pair programming.

Technology Stack

Our technology stack includes TypeScript (for both frontend and backend), React, a combination of SASS modules and Stitches for styling, Apollo GraphQL, Node.js, Postgres, and Redis. For this role, we are specifically seeking individuals with deep expertise in React, CSS, and HTML.

Benefits at Ashby

• Competitive salary and equity package.
• A 10-year exercise window for stock options, removing pressure to purchase immediately upon leaving Ashby.
• Unlimited PTO, with a recommendation of four weeks per year. We actively encourage vacation through our one-on-one agendas.
• Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US, with plans to extend this globally as situations evolve.
• Generous budget for equipment, software, and office furniture to ensure your happiness and productivity.
• A $100/month education budget, with larger expenses like conferences covered upon manager approval.
• For US employees, top-tier health insurance for you and your dependents, with all premiums fully covered by Ashby.

Ashby's success is built on hiring exceptional people and fostering an environment where everyone can be happy, feel challenged, and perform their best work. We are deliberately constructing this environment from the ground up, and we hope this inspires you 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

• Design System development
• Frontend Engineering
• React.js expertise
• UI/UX Design
• Customer Interaction
• Wireframing & Prototyping
• Information Architecture
• TypeScript
• Node.js
• GraphQL