Engineer Who Can Design

Hi 👋🏾 I’m Abhik, Ashby’s Co-Founder and VP of Engineering. As someone who could design and build software, this position is close to my heart. I always felt I had a unique perspective because I could play with design ideas and iterate in code. My ideas could start in Figma but then be grounded (or sometimes more creative) in code. My prototypes used actual logic and data. My changes cascaded throughout the app for comprehensive critique (thanks, React component system!). But, every company made me pick one —I couldn’t design and build. At Ashby, you can.

While every engineer can design and build, you’ll tackle our most challenging design problems and help others improve their designs by expanding and enhancing our in-house design system and consulting on bespoke work. To ground it with examples, engineers who can design 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 build custom autocompletes. These autocompletes can contain filters, options to create new records, etc.

• Helped another engineer improve their design’s information hierarchy and scannability for viewing a candidate’s assessments. Recruiters can quickly parse information and pick out anomalies.

These projects reflect what we’re accomplishing at Ashby: improving the productivity of working professionals (starting with talent teams) with intelligent and powerful software. We put a lot of effort into designing products that are approachable to beginners but mastered & extended by power users. In many ways, spreadsheets set the bar here.

We have many customers, great revenue growth, years of runway, and amazing investors like YCombinator, Elad Gil, and Lachy Groom. I’ll share more once we meet.

This is a staff-level role, so we require at least 5 years of experience as a full-time frontend engineer or evenly split between frontend and design for this role and significant contributions to (or leading) design systems.

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!).

Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate

Our engineering team (and the team at large) consists of lifelong learners who are humble and kind (meet them here!). These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally (we filter for it in interviews). 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 spend less than 4 hours per week in meetings (I wrote about it here). 

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 10x a day. Everyone on the team has contributed to developer experience 💪🏾

• 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) which we are constantly improving. Each improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app (short video below).

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:

Give Engineers Ownership & Autonomy

We, as engineers, find clever ways to solve problems, which amplifies when we deeply understand the problem. Benji and I did our best work as engineers when we had a deep understanding of the end-user and the business and ownership over the solution. Our engineering culture reflects this experience: engineers own projects end-to-end, from speaking with users to writing product specs to UX design. These are skills that we often don’t get to practice as engineers, and, at Ashby, we provide mentorship to grow them and help from the team where you want it.

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 (including my daughter!).

Today, 26% of engineers at Ashby are from underrepresented groups. It’s not great, and we are taking conscious steps to improve, like sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, no leetcode interviews, and more.

Interview Process

At Ashby, our team and interview process want to help you show your best self. We’ll dive into past projects and simulate working together via pair programming, writing tech specs collaboratively, and talking through decisions (no leetcode or whiteboard exercises). Our interview process is three rounds with some casual Zoom (or in-person) coffee in between to get to know each other: 

1. 30-minute introduction call to discuss Ashby and your past work (we demo Ashby!)

2. A technical screen (take home or, for more experienced folks who want it, a 90-minute live session)

3. A virtual on-site of 3 hours and 45 minutes (can be split across two days) 

Your hiring manager will be your main point of contact and prepare you for interviews. You’ll meet other engineering leaders and 4 to 6 engineers (with 15 minutes in each interview to ask them questions). If we don’t give an offer, we’ll provide feedback!

Your First Two Months at Ashby

We want an exceptional onboarding experience for every new hire. At Ashby, your dev environment sets up with a single script, you push your first change on day one, and we spend the rest of the time building your confidence in our codebase and practices culminating in delivering a prominent, impactful feature. We’ll pair you with a peer who’ll guide you through your first tasks and be someone you rely on, from answering questions to pair programming.

Technology Stack

Our tech stack is TypeScript (frontend & backend), React, a mix of SASS modules and Stitches, Apollo GraphQL, Node.js, Postgres, and Redis. We’re looking for folks with deep React, CSS, and HTML knowledge for this role.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.

• 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 with four weeks recommended per year. Expect “Vacation?” in our one-on-one agenda until you start taking it 😅.

• Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US. We plan to expand this to employees in other countries as situations arise.

• 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, top-notch health insurance for you and your dependents with all premiums 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.

Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.