Junior Design Engineer

Role overview

Ashby is looking for a Junior Design Engineer in Toronto who can both shape product experiences and implement them in code. This position is meant for people who enjoy moving fluidly between visual design and engineering, and who want to work closely with the co-founder and VP of Engineering on a formal design engineering team.

This is not a pure frontend role with a design label, and it is not a designer-only prototype role. The expectation is to contribute meaningfully to both the design and technical build of features, with strong taste, solid execution, and the ability to turn ideas into polished, scalable product experiences.

What you will work on

You will tackle difficult interface problems, strengthen and expand the internal design system, and support product engineers with custom design work when needed. The team expects design engineers to help with research-informed design, wireframing, implementation, and refinement of product areas that impact many users.

• Redesign mobile web experiences by speaking with active customers, creating wireframes, building on the design system, and converting concepts into refined interfaces.
• Create flexible and reusable components that help engineers build consistent setup flows and other product patterns more easily.
• Improve hierarchy, readability, and scannability in complex product views so users can quickly understand the data and spot anomalies.

Why this role stands out

The company operates at meaningful scale, with work that reaches more than 100,000 weekly active users and millions of candidates each week. The product is used by well-known customers such as Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake, and the team can gather feedback quickly from internal recruiting users and external customers.

The role is also backed strongly by the CEO and co-founder, and design engineering is treated as a real discipline rather than a renamed frontend function. The product itself is complex, which means the UI must feel approachable for first-time users while still supporting powerful customization and automation over time.

Who this role is not for

There are a few ways this role may not be a fit. If you only want to work on design systems, prefer to do extensive research before shipping anything, need everything to be perfect before launch, or depend on heavy process and project management to move work forward, this environment may feel uncomfortable. The team moves quickly, values ownership, and expects people to balance speed with quality.

It is also important that you bring strong visual taste and execution. The team wants design engineers who raise the visual standard of the product and continue improving it with every feature or redesign.

Level guidance

This posting is for the Junior level. For this level, the team is looking for no more than 2 years of industry experience as either a designer or an engineer. They also want to see personal or professional projects with at least a couple of users that demonstrate growing strength in both UI/UX and engineering.

Engineering culture

The engineering team is intentionally small and highly capable, with an emphasis on shipping high-quality software quickly while keeping regular working hours. The culture is built around minimal process, strong ownership, natural collaboration, deliberate communication, and investment in tools and abstractions that increase leverage.

Engineers are expected to run their own projects end to end. Product managers and designers set strategy and provide problem briefs, while engineers research the problem, write product specs, create wireframes, and implement the solution. The team prefers ownership and coaching over process-heavy oversight.

Collaboration is supported through research, prototypes, written proposals, and thoughtful communication across time zones. Focus time is protected, and engineers typically spend fewer than 2 hours a week in meetings. The team also meets in person at least twice a year, once as a department and once as a company, with a small budget available for local or regional meetups.

How the team builds

The company invests heavily in developer tooling, reusable product building blocks, and AI-assisted engineering tools. Their CI/CD pipeline is fast, deployments happen frequently, and engineers contribute to developer experience improvements. The product is built on shared systems such as analytics modeling, a query language, a policy engine, a workflow engine, and the design system.

AI is used to reduce repetitive work and speed up engineering tasks such as issue triage, fix suggestions, prototype generation, production-ready code generation, and code review support. Engineers have an unlimited token budget, though usage is not a performance metric.

Diversity and inclusion

The team places importance on building a diverse engineering organization and intentionally sources candidates from underrepresented groups. The company also highlights generous paid family leave and the absence of leetcode interviews as part of that commitment.

Interview process

The hiring process is designed to help candidates show their best work. It includes discussion of prior projects, collaborative design and programming exercises, and no leetcode or whiteboard testing.

• If shortlisted, you will be asked to share a video walkthrough of a product or feature you have designed.
• Recruiter introduction call lasting about 30 minutes, live, with examples of your work ready to screen-share.
• A 30-minute live conversation with the co-founder and VP of Engineering to discuss previous work in more depth.
• A collaborative session focused on design system thinking, including writing or refining design system specs.
• A pair-programming style session where you work through implementation and decision-making with the team.
• Final discussion focused on fit, leveling, and overall alignment with the role.

Application expectations

Candidates are expected to apply at the level that best matches their experience so that expectations during review and interviews are aligned. For this posting, that means Junior-level experience and evidence of both design ability and engineering ability.

Location

This is a full-time onsite role based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Additional notes

The company has stated that it values fast iteration, user feedback, and practical shipping over waiting for perfection. It also emphasizes that design engineers are expected to contribute beyond a narrow specialty, including helping with customer issues and investigations as needed.

The team description mentions a small, talented group that values humility, kindness, and strong written communication. The role may suit someone who enjoys end-to-end ownership and working closely with product, design, and infrastructure partners.