Design Engineer – Canada

Ashby is hiring a Design Engineer to combine high-quality UI/UX design with hands-on frontend implementation for its recruiting software platform. The role involves solving complex product-design problems, expanding the design system, creating wireframes, and shipping polished interfaces used at scale. Candidates need strong visual judgment alongside practical engineering capability, particularly in TypeScript, React, and CSS. Engineers own projects end to end, from problem exploration and product specifications through implementation, iteration, and communication with stakeholders. This Canada-based role suits an autonomous product-minded practitioner who can balance rapid delivery with thoughtful design execution.

The role requires uncommon depth across both product design and frontend engineering while owning ambiguous, complex projects end to end. Success depends on strong visual taste, technical execution, fast iteration, and proactive stakeholder communication with minimal process support.

Core skills associated with this opportunity include:

• Product design
• UI design
• UX design
• Design systems
• Frontend development
• TypeScript
• React
• CSS
• Wireframing
• Prototyping
• Information architecture
• User feedback analysis
• Component architecture
• Cross-functional collaboration

Design Engineers 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 that system to turn the wireframes into a polished UI.
• Built a set of flexible, composable components in our design system that allow other engineers to build beautiful, consistent setup wizards across our product easily.
• Helped a Product Engineer improve the information hierarchy and scannability of their design for viewing a candidate’s assessments.

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.

Design Engineers come in many flavors, not all of which fit our model. Here are some reasons you might not enjoy the role:

• You only want to work on design systems.
• You like to do extensive research and user testing before implementation.
• You want everything to be perfect before it gets into a user’s hands.
• You don’t have excellent taste and execution in visual design.
• You need company-driven process and structure to get your projects across the finish line.
• You only want to do exciting work.

We’ve posted levels from Junior to Staff. The higher the level, the more experience and alignment with the role we expect when reviewing your application and while interviewing.

As engineers, we are used to tooling that makes us better at what we do. When we started Ashby, we saw the opposite with Talent Acquisition software. Recruiting teams were leveling up how they did their work, but instead of software meeting this new standard, it held them back.

Our engineering culture is motivated by the belief that a small, talented team, given the right environment, can build high-quality software fast. We do it through minimal process with ownership over decisions normally made by product and design, natural collaboration and deliberate communication, and investing in tools and abstractions that give us leverage.