Ashby

Staff Design Engineer, UK

Remote EMEA Engineering role with clear candidate location fit.

PostedNov 13, 2025

Eligible countries1 accepted country

Seniority signalLead

Work settingRemote

Accepted candidate locations

United Kingdom

Role overview

Readable role content extracted into sections for faster review.

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.
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.

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 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.

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.
Design Engineer - 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).
Staff Design Engineer (This Posting) - 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.

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

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 💪🏾.
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).
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.

Introduction call with me (30m, live). Be prepared to screen-share examples of your work.
A second round where we either do a technical screen (1h, live) or a design take-home (~3h async, 30m live)
Three interviews, a deep dive into a past design system or design project, a design system interview, and the interview we didn’t do in the second round: technical screen or design take-home. (3h, live)

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, 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.

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