Staff Product Designer, Ashby
$180-200k
Canada: CA$180K – CA$200K. Plus equity, with 10-year exercise window for stock options
All-in-one recruiting software
Be an early applicant
All-in-one recruiting software
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$180-200k
Canada: CA$180K – CA$200K. Plus equity, with 10-year exercise window for stock options
101-200 employees
Company mission
To redefine the applicant tracking system (ATS) category, providing talent teams with analytics, workflows and automation.
Role
Who you are
- 10+ years of product design experience, with the majority being in desktop SaaS
- Able to take huge, ambiguous projects and break them down into actionable parts
- Able to speak to patterns of the highest functioning design teams and how to create an environment of high performance
- Able to leverage designers' superpowers to influence engineering, product, and the rest of the company
- Able to create standards and principles that will help improve the quality of design across the product org
- Able to think from first principles instead of simply applying the “standard” UX processes
- Enough experience that your intuition can solve most usability problems without having to rely solely on data & metrics or conducting user research
- Curious & resourceful enough to come up with creative solutions and de-risk them appropriately
- Best-in-class skills in layout, navigation, IA, UI, and interaction design
- Obsession with craft & details
- You have experience at an early-stage startup or have spent time as a solo designer on a team
- You may want to apply if you’re excited about:
- Creating leverage and impact far and above what you'd see in a typical EPD product team structure. You won’t be a cog in the wheel, the wheel is not very big!
- Getting to work on all parts of a massive product surface area - spanning many user types, JTBDs, usability challenges, etc. Unlike in other organizations, you won’t be stuck working on one problem for many years
- Helping reinvent the design model for modern enterprise software—you don’t have to build wireframes, user journeys, personas, etc. What matters is solving a customer’s problem; what tools you use are up to you
- Covering all parts of the design process with a focus on design craft. You'll still be doing the occasional user research interview but will be focused on using heuristics & experience to improve our IA, navigation, interactions, UI patterns, and more
- Helping build our design system from (almost) the ground up
What the job involves
- The design department’s job at Ashby is not to make every single design decision but to equip our entire product team to make better decisions themselves, as well as edit decisions that PMs/Engineers choose to make. That, while tackling the biggest design challenges ourselve
- Consulting for engineers who need help structuring layout, typography, flows, etc
- Digging into problems by consulting GTM, talking to customers, asking for data requests, and more in order to present confident assumptions about your proposals
- Using Figma to draw out your ideas and create visual artifacts for stakeholder alignment
- Writing specification docs (we call them specs!) that detail your design proposals. These documents are meant to get stakeholder alignment on the biggest decisions you want to make and are a core part of how we work at Ashby
- Taking ownership of larger product features and thinking through Jobs-To-Be-Done, navigation, information architecture, layout, interaction, etc
- Taking in customer feedback and using heuristics to build your own usability backlog and propose projects for engineers to take on
- Consolidating and refining our design system to be functional, aesthetic, and best-in-class
Application 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 and talking through decisions. Our interview process is four rounds with some casual Zoom coffee in between to get to know each other:
- 30-minute introduction call to discuss Ashby and your experience
- 45-minute portfolio review
- 135-minute design exercise, portfolio deep dive, and meet the CEO. The exercise will be a live whiteboarding exercise where we provide a prompt and you show us how you'd break down problems and come up with solutions. The portfolio review is a repeat but you'd have more time and a different audience
- 90-minute meet the team + an app teardown
- You’ll meet other engineers and product managers as well (with 15 minutes in each interview to ask them questions). If we don’t give an offer, I'll provide feedback as to why if you'd like it (I'm serious!)
Our take
Reportedly, 50% of employers don’t use applicant tracking systems, largely because of blockers with implementation or insufficient buy-in from top management. Ashby's co-founder and CEO, Benji Encz, experienced first-hand how existing solutions failed to support hyper-growth hiring needs whilst working at PlanGrid, which is in part what led to the creation of the company.
Ashby is looking to redefine the ATS category - providing talent teams with analytics, workflows and automation - and intends to replace solutions from well-established vendors like Greenhouse and Lever with algorithms. The company's AI can schedule interviews and infer demographic data, which clients use for aggregate analyses of DEI hiring metrics.
The market for recruitment software could potentially reach $3.5 billion by 2030. Unsurprisingly, there is now a growing number of startups emerging to compete for a slice of it. Despite the crowded market and having only emerged from stealth in 2022, Ashby has already secured over 500 clients (including high-profile customers like Notion and Figma). The company has also attracted impressive funding which will be used to expand its product offering beyond what is typically expected from an ATS.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Jul 2025
$50m
SERIES D
Jun 2024
$30m
SERIES C
Total funding: $114.7m
Company benefits
- Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year
- 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
- Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget
- $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval
- Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave 🇺🇸
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Benjamin Encz
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously the Director of Engineering and Part-Time Recruitment Operations at PlanGrid. They also worked as a Software Engineer at Make School and was a Lecturer at Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University (DHBW).
Abhik Pramanik
(Co-Founder)VP of Engineer at Ashby. Previously a Senior Product Manager at Lob and a Senior Product Manager at PlanGrid.
Share this job
View 23 more jobs at Ashby