Staff Product Designer

Tensec; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and equity

10-year exercise window for stock options

Unlimited PTO

Paid family leave

Equipment and software budget

$100/month education budget

Comprehensive health insurance

Job summary

An innovative software company is looking for a versatile senior product designer to help reshape software design. This role combines elements of product management and design, with responsibilities including consulting engineers, creating user-centric designs, and managing the design system. Ideal candidates will have over 10 years of experience in desktop SaaS environments and be comfortable working independently while contributing to a remote team. The position offers competitive salary, equity, unlimited PTO, and top-tier health insurance.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of product design experience, primarily in desktop SaaS.
• Skilled in breaking down complex, ambiguous projects into actionable tasks.
• Strong understanding of design team dynamics and performance enhancement.

Responsibilities

• Consult for engineers on design structure and flow.
• Conduct stakeholder discussions for informed design proposals.
• Create visual artifacts using Figma for alignment with stakeholders.
• Write detailed specs to align stakeholders on design proposals.
• Take ownership of features considering usability and customer feedback.

Skills

Product design experience

Ability to break down ambiguous projects

Understanding of high functioning design teams

Influencing engineering and product

Creation of design standards and principles

Intuitive problem-solving

Creative solution development

Layout and interaction design

Attention to craft and details

Startup experience

Job description

About Ashby

Hi! 👋 I'm Chris, head of Product Design at Ashby.

We're looking for a versatile, intrinsically motivated designer who is excited to contribute to rethinking how modern software is designed. At Ashby, you'll be part designer, part product manager, part consultant, and part design system manager (or some combination of the 4!). We do design differently here, and if that excites you, read on.

Our unique approach is working - we're growing >100% year-over-year and have notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. Our growth and retention metrics are best-in-class among our peers: we have tens of millions in ARR, very low churn, and many years of runway. We're backed by amazing investors like Y Combinator, Elad Gil, Lachy Groom, and many more!

How We Work

In my previous roles, product teams always consisted of a product manager, a designer, and ~4‑5 engineers. This may sound familiar to you! The product manager briefs the designer who then designs. After designing, mocks are handed to the engineers.

We take a more principled approach here at Ashby. If you've been designing software enough, you'll realize in actuality, design is required in varying degrees on each project. Sometimes in the past, I'd be asked to design yet another settings page, when really all that was needed was an engineer to reuse existing components and just follow some documentation I had written. Other times, I felt I should effectively be the product manager and own a project from beginning to end. In these latter cases, it made sense that I was even the one providing project updates and managing resources rather than constantly being pinged by a separate product manager.

What We’re Building

Talent teams aspire to build a hiring process that identifies great candidates, moves them quickly through the interview process, and provides an excellent experience for the candidate. To accomplish this, recruiters perform thousands of daily tasks to coordinate and relay information between candidates, interviewers, and hiring managers. Teams struggle to keep up!

Scheduling a final round is an excellent example of our customers' challenges. A recruiter needs to collect availability from the candidate, identify potential interviewers, perform “Calendar Tetris” to find who is available to interview the candidate, schedule on the earliest date possible, and perform any last‑minute adjustments as availability changes. They must perform this while considering the interview load on each individual and whether interviewers need to be trained and shadowing others.

Ashby provides talent teams with intelligent and powerful software that provides insights into where they’re failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they’re underwater with. We put a lot of effort into designing products that are approachable to beginners but mastered and extended by power users. In many ways, spreadsheets set the bar here (and are what we often replace!).

Your Qualifications

• 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.

Conversely, You May Not Want To Apply If

• You feel uncomfortable designing independently without much guidance from a PM or design management.
• You’re uncomfortable having your decisions and process being challenged constantly by engineering & product.
• You prefer an in‑person role over remote (Ashby operates remotely).
• You dislike written documentation.
• You want a set structure and rhythm to your projects.
  • PM gives you a brief, you do wireframes, then mocks, then pass off work to engineers. Rinse and repeat.
• You prefer a narrow job scope - interaction design only, design system only, etc.

On a Weekly Basis You Will Find Yourself

• 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.

Benefits

• 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. This is one of the reasons I joined personally - not a lot of startups do this.
• Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year. Expect “Vacation?” in our one‑on‑one agenda until you start taking it.
• Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US. We plan to expand this to employees in other countries as situations arise.
• 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, top‑notch health insurance for you and your dependents with all premiums covered by us.

Ashby’s success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. We’re being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. I hope that excites you enough to apply.

Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.