Design Engineer

Fully Remote Full Time Permanent

2 Nov

Written by Dianne Fisher

Employer: Ashby

Location: Remote, United Kingdom

Working hours: Full time

* L3 (Senior): UK - London£123K – £149K • Offers Equity

* L3 (Senior): UK - Other£114K – £138K • Offers Equity

* L2 (Mid): UK - London£72K – £88K • Offers Equity

* L2 (Mid): UK - Other£56K – £69K • Offers Equity

* #### Job description

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 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. 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 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’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.

* 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. I hope that 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.

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.

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