Design Engineer

Role overview

Ashby is looking for a Design Engineer in Canada who is equally comfortable shaping the user experience and implementing it in code. This is a dedicated Design Engineering role and department, built to support people who enjoy moving fluidly between design and engineering. The team is expanding from five members to more than ten over the next year.

The role is not a frontend engineering position with a design label, and it is not a design-only role focused on prototyping. Success here comes from doing both disciplines well: using strong visual judgment to define the product experience, and strong technical ability to bring that experience to life.

What you will work on

You will tackle complex design challenges, help raise the quality of the in-house design system, and advise product engineers on custom design work when needed. The role spans product thinking, system design, UI polish, and implementation.

• Rework mobile web experiences by speaking with frequent customers, creating wireframes for new flows, applying the design system, and turning those concepts into refined interfaces.
• Develop flexible, reusable design system components that help other engineers build polished and consistent setup flows across the product.
• Improve the structure and readability of product screens so recruiters can quickly understand information, spot irregularities, and work faster.

Why the role stands out

This position is designed for people who want real product impact at scale. The work reaches more than 100,000 weekly active users and millions of candidates each week, with customers including Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. You will also get rapid feedback from Ashby’s internal recruiting team and hiring managers who use the product daily.

The company has supported this role from the beginning, and leadership has continued to invest in it as the business has grown. The UI and UX of Ashby’s product are expected to balance ease of first use with increasing power, flexibility, and automation for experienced users.

Who this role is not for

Applicants may not enjoy this position if they only want to work on design systems, prefer long research cycles before shipping, expect everything to be perfect before release, or rely heavily on structured project management. The team moves quickly, values iterative improvement, and expects strong visual taste and solid execution. This role also includes shared responsibility for customer issues and investigations, so it is not limited to only the most exciting feature work.

Level guidance

Ashby has posted different levels from Junior through Staff and expects applicants to choose the level that best matches their background and fit.

• Junior Design Engineer: Up to 2 years of industry experience as either a designer or engineer. Applicants should show personal or professional work with at least a couple of users that demonstrates strong visual sense and growing strength in both UI/UX and engineering.
• Design Engineer: For mid to senior level applicants with 2+ years of continuous experience as an engineer or designer. You should be strong in both design and engineering, with exceptional ability in the area you practice full time. Experience shipping products and code to hundreds of users is expected, including through side projects if relevant.
• Staff Design Engineer: For people who have professionally practiced Ashby’s style of design engineering, even if the title was different. You should have made meaningful contributions to a design system, built and shipped features for hundreds of users, and improved them using feedback over time.

About the product

Ashby was created because recruiting software was not keeping up with the needs of modern hiring teams. The company aims to provide talent acquisition teams with software that is intelligent, powerful, and able to simplify or automate the work that slows them down.

One example is interview scheduling, which traditionally requires manual coordination of candidate and interviewer availability, handling complex scheduling constraints, tracking preparation, and adjusting plans as availability changes. Ashby is built to make that work faster, smarter, and easier.

Engineering culture

The engineering team is built around small-team speed, high ownership, and strong communication. The company believes that talented engineers do their best work when given the right environment, regular working hours, and enough autonomy to run projects end to end.

• There is minimal process, with engineers taking ownership over decisions that are often handled by product and design elsewhere.
• Collaboration is natural, while communication is intentionally clear and well thought out.
• The team invests in tools and abstractions that create leverage across the product.
• Diversity is a deliberate priority for the company and engineering organization.

How work is run

At Ashby, engineers are expected to own projects broadly. Product managers and designers set strategy, do customer research, and hand off a problem brief. Engineers then research the issue, write product specs, build wireframes, and implement the solution end to end. Engineers are also expected to keep the right people informed rather than depending on heavy process.

The company uses research, prototyping, and written proposals to gather feedback across time zones while protecting focus time. Engineers are reported to spend fewer than 2 hours per week in meetings. Ashby also meets in person at least twice a year, once as a department and once as a company, and provides a small budget to meet team members in your city or region.

Leverage and tooling

Ashby emphasizes building leverage instead of simply growing headcount. The team invests heavily in developer tooling, core building blocks, and AI-assisted workflows to speed up high-quality product development.

• CI/CD is fast, taking about 10 minutes, and the team deploys at least 15 times per day.
• The product is built on reusable components such as analytics modeling, query language, policy engine, workflow engine, and design system.
• AI tools are used to automate repetitive work, generate ideas, suggest fixes, create production-ready code, and help with code review.
• Engineers have an unlimited token budget for AI tools, though usage is not a tracked performance metric.

Diversity and inclusion

Ashby says it actively works to improve representation in engineering. At present, 25% of engineers and 50% of engineering leaders are from underrepresented groups. The company highlights practices such as sourcing diverse candidates, offering generous paid family leave, and avoiding leetcode-style interviews.

Interview process

The interview process is designed to help candidates show their best work and includes project discussion, pairing, design collaboration, and decision-making conversations. There are no leetcode or whiteboard exercises.

• Intro call with the co-founder and VP of Engineering, lasting 30 minutes and conducted live, with screen-sharing examples of your work.
• A second round that is either a 1-hour live technical screen or an approximately 3-hour asynchronous design take-home followed by a 30-minute live discussion.
• Three more interviews, including a deep dive into a past design system or design project.

What to expect from the role

This is a hands-on role for someone who wants to influence both the look and the underlying implementation of the product. It suits people who enjoy fast iteration, thoughtful craftsmanship, and working closely with product and engineering partners.

Applicants should be ready to show examples of work and discuss how they think about design quality, implementation choices, and product tradeoffs.

Location

This position is based in Canada and is an onsite role.