Founding Design Engineer: AI Tooling & Design Systems

TikTok Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 122,000 - 272,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok Inc. in San Jose, CA seeks a highly experienced UX Engineer to advance the design-to-engineering workflow and oversee a design system-driven product experience.

You will partner with product designers and client engineers to streamline handoffs and drive production-quality implementations that improve user experience. You will also shape AI tooling, build agent-based features, and help define the technical direction across design and product teams, translating design intent into scalable

Qualifications

• With engineering experience shipping production mobile or full-stack systems.
• Full-stack capability with deep expertise in at least one mobile stack (iOS/Swift, SwiftUI or Android/Kotlin, Compose) and working knowledge of backend.
• Deep, hands-on use of AI coding agents (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.) with efficient token budgeting, agentic workflows, and a track record of shipping with them; products you built independently end-to-end strongly preferred.
• Experience building or shipping AI product features or agent-based workflows.
• Ability to solve complex problems with simple solutions.
• Founding or early-team experience, or clear evidence of having shaped a team/practice from scratch.
• Strong product thinking, able to drive ambiguous problems all the way to shipped impact.

Responsibilities

• Reshape the design-to-engineering workflow - Partner with product designers and client engineers to identify friction in the handoff, and close the gap through better processes and shared practices.
• Explore aggressively - Run multiple feasibility tracks for new workflows and tooling in parallel, rather than picking one and grinding.
• Close the loop into production - Lead how design-delivered code integrates with the mainline codebase, partnering with engineering to systematize design system components, performance, and accessibility into production-quality implementations that improve user experience.
• Build AI design tooling - Architect and ship internal AI tooling (agents, design system plugins, code-generation pipelines, prototyping platforms) that lets every designer move from idea to high-fidelity prototype to shippable code with leverage.
• Drive technical direction across design and product - Partner with engineering leads on architecture, design system evolution, and tooling roadmap. Translate design intent into engineering trade-offs, and vice versa.

Skills

Mobile & full-stack experience

iOS/Swift or Android/Kotlin

AI coding agents

AI product features

Problem solving

Founding/early-team

Product thinking

Tools

Cursor

Claude Code

Job description

TikTok Inc. in San Jose, CA seeks a highly experienced UX Engineer to advance the design-to-engineering workflow and oversee a design system-driven product experience.

You will partner with product designers and client engineers to streamline handoffs and drive production-quality implementations that improve user experience. You will also shape AI tooling, build agent-based features, and help define the technical direction across design and product teams, translating design intent into scalable