Design Engineer

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.

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 senior-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).

**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:

- 30-minute in