• Introduction by Abhik, Ashby's Co-Founder and VP of Engineering:
• The role combines design and coding excellence.
• Design Engineer is a formal role and department working closely with leadership.
• The team is growing from five to over ten in the next year.
• Role Expectations:
• Design Engineers design and code; not just frontend engineers or designers coding prototypes.
• Work on challenging design problems.
• Improve in-house design system.
• Consult on bespoke design work for Product Engineers.
• Examples of Work Done by Design Engineers at Ashby:
• Redesigned mobile web app through customer interviews, wireframing, implementing design system, and polished UI.
• Built flexible, composable components for setup wizards used across the product.
• Helped improve information hierarchy and scannability for candidate assessment views.
• Unique Opportunities at Ashby for Design Engineers:
• Work on a product at scale with over 100,000 weekly active users and notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, Snowflake.
• Direct feedback from recruiting teams and hiring managers daily.
• Strong commitment from CEO & Co-Founder and VP of Engineering to this role.
• Shape UI/UX of a powerful and complex product balancing approachability with customization.
• Why You Shouldn't Apply (Reasons):
• Only want to work exclusively on design systems.
• Prefer extensive research and user testing before implementation rather than iterative shipping.
• Want everything perfect before user exposure rather than fast shipping with iteration.
• Lack excellent taste and execution in visual design.
• Need company-driven process/structure to complete projects rather than self-driven ownership.
• Only want to do exciting work without handling customer issues or investigations.
• Seniority/Level Guidance:
• Junior Design Engineer: = 2 years industry experience as designer or engineer. Must show projects with good visual taste and emerging UI/UX & engineering skills.
• Design Engineer (Mid/Senior): 2+ years continuous experience as engineer or designer. Proficient in both design and engineering with experience shipping products to hundreds of users.
• Staff Design Engineer (This Posting): Professional practice of combined design engineering. Major contributions to design systems and feature implementation iterated through user feedback.
• What Ashby is Building:
• Talent Acquisition software that improves recruiting teams efficiency beyond current tooling limitations.
• Example: Simplifying complex scheduling processes for recruiters through intelligent software.
• Engineering Culture:

Motivated by belief that small talented teams can build high-quality software fast while working regular hours through:

Minimal process with ownership over decisions normally made by product/design teams.

1. Natural collaboration and deliberate communication.
2. Investment in tools and abstractions for leverage.
3. Building a diverse team.

• Minimal Process & Ownership Details:
• Engineers run their projects end-to-end including research, specs, wireframes, implementation.
• Product Managers/Designers provide strategy and problem briefs only.
• Emphasis on engineer ownership rather than process reliance.
• Collaboration & Communication Details:
• Team values humility, kindness, lifelong learning.
• Collaboration is natural; communication is deliberate with minimal meetings (<2h/week).
• In-person meetings twice a year plus small budget for local meetups.
• Increasing Leverage Instead of Team Size:

Investments include:

• Great developer tooling: CI/CD ~10 minutes, 15+ deployments/day, integrated debugger.
• Common components: analytics modeling/query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system improved continuously cascading throughout app.
• AI-powered tooling: automates mundane tasks like triaging issues, suggesting fixes, prototyping ideas, generating code reviews. Unlimited token budget for engineers.