Ashby - Design Engineer, EU

• 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. • What Seniority/Level To Apply For • We’ve posted levels from Junior to Staff. The higher the level, the more experience and alignment with the role we expect when reviewing your application and while interviewing. Please apply to the one that sets the right expectations. • Junior Design Engineer - You should have no more than 2 years of industry experience as a designer or engineer. We want to see projects (personal or professional) with at least a couple of users that showcase great visual taste and burgeoning talent in both UI/UX and Engineering. • Junior Design Engineer • Design Engineer (This Posting) - This posting covers both Mid and Senior levels. You have 2+ years of continuous experience (e.g., internships don’t count) as an Engineer or a Designer. You have good proficiency in both Design and Engineering, with exceptional proficiency in the discipline you practice full-time. Regardless of which discipline you’re coming from, we expect experience designing products and shipping code to hundreds of users (even if through side projects). • Design Engineer (This Posting) • Staff Design Engineer - We’re looking for folks who’ve practiced our flavor of Design Engineering professionally. It may not be through a formal title, but you’ve made major contributions to a design system and designed and implemented features for hundreds of users and iterated on them through user feedback. • Staff Design Engineer • Internally, we do not use these titles, but Engineers are leveled based on proficiency (which you can read about here). • What We’re Building • As engineers, we are used to tooling that makes us better at what we do. When we started Ashby, we saw the opposite with Talent Acquisition software. Recruiting teams were leveling up how they did their work, but instead of software meeting this new standard, it held them back. • better • Scheduling a final round is an excellent example. Recruiting teams wanted to schedule candidates faster, track interviewer preparation and quality, and do it with half the headcount. A recruiter needed to manually collect availability from the candidate, identify qualified interviewers, perform “Calendar Tetris” to find who is available to interview the candidate, schedule on the earliest date possible, and make any last-minute adjustments as availability changed. They must do this while considering the interview load on each individual and whether interviewers need to be trained and shadowing others. 🥵 TA software didn’t help. • As hiring managers, we know TA is a critical function, and as engineers, we know software can do better. So, we built and continue to build Ashby to give TA teams the highest standard of tooling. Software that’s intelligent and powerful. Software that provides insights into where they’re failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they’re underwater with. We want other functions and departments to be jealous of what TA teams can do with Ashby, and today they often are! • Engineering Culture • Our engineering culture is motivated by Benji’s (my Co-founder and CEO) and my belief that a small, talented team, given the right environment, can build high-quality software fast (and work regular hours!). We do it through: • Minimal process with ownership over decisions normally made by product and design • Natural collaboration and deliberate communication • Investing in tools and abstractions that give us leverage • Putting effort into building a diverse team • Minimal Process & Lots of Ownership • The best engineers we’ve worked with delivered reliably magical outcomes. They took customer problems and relentlessly drove them to solutions that were not only successful but often brilliant and creative. While they did this with minimal oversight, stakeholders were never in the dark as to what was going on, and no setback was a surprise. • Traditional product-development processes aren’t meant for the best engineers. Their purpose is to create consistent outcomes regardless of the engineer’s skill. But, consistency comes at the expense of an engineer’s time and freedom—both ingredients necessary to generate those magical outcomes. As a result, process stifles the best engineers and doesn’t give others the opportunity to practice the behaviors that made the best engineers the “best.” • At Ashby, we want to build an environment that encourages every engineer to be their best. So, at Ashby, every Engineer runs their project. Product Managers (and Designers) build strategy, do customer research, and hand off problem briefs to Engineers. Engineers take on the rest: they research the problem, write product specs, build wireframes, and implement their solution end-to-end. We rely on engineers, not process, to push information outward to the relevant folks (e.g., Product Managers) and pull folks in to help (e.g., Designers, Infra). It’s a new level of ownership for many engineers, but we’d rather an engineer fail a bit and coach up their skills than use process as a crutch. Not everyone succeeds in our culture, but those who do thrive. • Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate • Our engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind (meet them here!). These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally. We combine this with research, prototyping, and written proposals to see around corners and get feedback from the team across time zones. Focus time is something that we hold sacred, and, with thoughtful and deliberate communication, engineers are in <2h meetings per week (I wrote about it here). • To drive it home, here's a recent calendar of an engineer who has been with us for over 4 years. ~34 hours of focus time, 2.5h of interviews, and 3.5 hours of meetings: • We also meet in person at least twice a year, once as a department and once as a company. You also have a small budget to meet up with folks in your city/region. • Increase Leverage, not Team Size • We built Ashby with the quality, breadth, and depth that many customers would expect from much larger teams over larger time scales. We’ve done this through investment in: • Great developer tooling. Our CI/CD takes ~10m, and we deploy at least 15x a day. A debugger that works out of the box. Everyone on the team has contributed to our developer experience 💪🏾. • Great developer tooling. • Building blocks to create powerful and customizable products fast. At the core of Ashby is a set of common components (analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) that we constantly improve. Each improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app (short video below). • Building blocks to create powerful and customizable products fast. • AI-powered tooling. We think of AI as a way to automate the mundane parts of building and maintaining high-quality software. We use a combination of third-party and internally built tools that, for instance, auto-triage customer issues, suggest fixes, prototype ideas, generate production-ready code, and conduct code reviews. Engineers have an unlimited token budget (but are not measured on it). We write in detail about our philosophy, current use of AI, and future plans for AI in Engineering here. • AI-powered tooling. • Here’s an impromptu quote from Arjun in our company Slack of what it’s like to build a feature at Ashby: • And a demo of one of these building blocks: • Put Effort into Diversity • Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Having seen my mother and partner build their careers as minority women in non-diverse fields, I want to make sure Ashby creates opportunities for the next generation of engineers from underrepresented groups. • Today, 25% of engineers and 50% of our engineering leaders at Ashby are from underrepresented groups. We are taking conscious steps to improve, like sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, no leetcode interviews, and more. • 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. • 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.