Staff Design Engineer, Canada

Hi 👋🏾 I’m Abhik https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhikpramanik/, 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. The Design Engineer role is more common today than five years ago, but I believe Ashby offers a unique opportunity that few can match: - First, 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). - Second, 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. In this role, 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 it to make the wireframes a reality. - Built a set of flexible, composable components in our design system that allow other engineers to easily build beautiful, consistent setup wizards across our product. - 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. 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. That often means we don’t agonize over every detail and instead 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...