Junior Design Engineer

About the role

Ashby is looking for a Junior Design Engineer in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. This position is built for someone who wants to do both: create thoughtful product design and implement it in code. The team sees design engineering as a distinct discipline rather than a renamed frontend role or a design-only prototyping position.

The company’s Co-Founder and VP of Engineering describes this role as a place for people who enjoy blending visual taste with technical execution. The expectation is that you will shape UX and UI while also building the feature end-to-end, with each side of the work informing the other. The team behind this function has existed for more than five years, and Ashby plans to expand it from five people to over ten within the next year.

What you will work on

You will tackle difficult product design problems, contribute to the company’s internal design system, and collaborate with product engineers on custom design work. The work can include redesigning complex flows, improving UI consistency through reusable components, and helping make product experiences easier to scan and understand.

• Rework web and mobile experiences by learning from frequent users, creating wireframes, building on the design system, and turning concepts into polished interfaces.
• Develop flexible design-system components that help other engineers create consistent and attractive workflows with less effort.
• Support product engineers in improving hierarchy, readability, and usability for dense product surfaces such as assessments and review views.

What this role is like

This role is intended for people who like shipping real product work at scale. Ashby’s software serves more than 100,000 weekly active users and millions of candidates each week, with customers including Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. The team uses its own recruiting staff and hiring managers as frequent feedback sources, and customer reactions can arrive as soon as the day a feature is released.

The company values speed, ownership, and strong visual execution. The UI needs to feel approachable for first-time users while still supporting advanced customization and automation for complex recruiting workflows.

Who may not be a fit

• People who only want to focus on design systems and nothing else.
• People who prefer to do extensive research before ever shipping a working version.
• People who need every detail to be perfect before a feature reaches users.
• People who do not have strong visual taste or polished execution.
• People who need heavy process, sprint structure, or project management to keep work moving.
• People who only want the most exciting projects and do not want to help with customer issues or investigations.

Seniority guidance

This posting is for the Junior level. Applicants should have no more than 2 years of industry experience as either a designer or an engineer. The team wants to see personal or professional projects with at least a couple of users that demonstrate strong visual taste and growing strength in both UI/UX and engineering.

Ashby also notes that it posts multiple levels separately, including Design Engineer and Staff Design Engineer. For this particular listing, candidates should apply only if the Junior expectations match their background.

Product context

Ashby builds talent acquisition software meant to help recruiting teams work faster and with better insight. The company was created to replace software that slowed recruiting teams down instead of helping them operate at a higher standard. One example is scheduling a final-round interview, which can require collecting availability, identifying interviewers, managing scheduling constraints, handling training and shadowing needs, and adapting to last-minute changes. Ashby aims to automate or simplify those burdens so recruiting teams can do more with less.

Engineering culture

The engineering organization is intentionally built around a small, highly capable team that works with minimal process and strong ownership. Engineers are expected to run their own projects end-to-end: product managers and designers handle strategy, research, and brief creation, while engineers take on research, specs, wireframes, implementation, and communication with the rest of the team.

Collaboration is meant to feel natural, while communication is deliberate and written. The team emphasizes focus time, and engineers typically spend fewer than 2 hours a week in meetings. The company also meets in person at least twice a year, once as a department and once as a company, and employees receive a small budget to meet teammates in their city or region.

Leverage and tooling

Ashby invests heavily in tooling and shared building blocks so a small team can ship high-quality software quickly. This includes strong developer tooling, a fast CI/CD pipeline with deployments at least 15 times per day, common platform components such as analytics modeling, query language, policy engine, workflow engine, and the design system, as well as AI-powered tools for issue triage, code suggestions, code generation, and code review. Engineers are given an unlimited token budget for AI tools, though usage is not a performance metric.

Diversity and inclusion

The company says it is intentionally working to build a more diverse team and create opportunities for engineers from underrepresented groups. It states that 25% of engineers and 50% of engineering leaders are from underrepresented groups. Actions the company highlights include sourcing diverse candidates, offering generous paid family leave, and removing leetcode-style interviews.

Interview process

Ashby says its interview process is designed to help candidates present their best work. The process includes discussion of past projects, pair programming, collaborative design system work, and conversation around design and engineering decisions. There are no leetcode or whiteboard exercises.

• If shortlisted, you will be asked for a video walkthrough of a product or feature you have designed.
• Recruiter introduction call of 30 minutes, live, with screen-sharing of your work.
• 30-minute live conversation with the VP of Engineering to review past work.
• A live pair-programming or collaborative design exercise.
• Final round with additional team members to go deeper on the role and fit.

Additional notes

Internally, Ashby does not use the public job titles shown in the posting; engineers are leveled through an internal system. The role is based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and is an onsite full-time position.

Openings were not specified in the source.

Salary was not disclosed in the source.

Start date, application deadline, and internship duration were not provided.