Hardware UX Designer (Graduate) - Edge AI & Spatial UX

ByteDance; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 76,000 - 151,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) match

Parental leave

Disability coverage

Wellbeing benefits

Paid personal time

Job summary

ByteDance seeks a Hardware UX Designer Graduate for Pico-Edge AI & Spatial Computing, starting in 2027 in San Jose. You will partner with customers, field teams, engineers, and end users to shape real-world workflows into UX hypotheses and prototype plans.

You will design forward-deployed UX programs across industries, balancing on-device AI with cloud considerations, and collaborating with ML, hardware, and design teams to create coherent, end-to-end experiences.

Qualifications

• Master's degree in a relevant field such as HCI, UX, AR/VR, or related disciplines.
• Experience designing embedded AR/MR hardware or physical‑digital products with a portfolio.
• Understanding of on-device AI, edge computing, and tradeoffs between inference speed and battery life.
• Strong foundation in industrial design and spatial interaction design for hardware constraints.
• Experience collaborating across mechanical, hardware, and AI teams to develop hardware‑software experiences.
• Proficiency with modern prototyping tools (Figma, 3D tools) and familiarity with sensor data (IMUs) and edge hardware.

Responsibilities

• Partner directly with customers, field teams, engineers, and end users to translate workflows into UX hypotheses and prototype plans.
• Design forward-deployed UX programs that adapt capabilities across environments without fragmenting the experience.
• Define how on-device AI communicates state, progress, and actions across SLMs, local models, and edge architectures.
• Determine which interactions stay local vs cloud and design graceful degradation under limited connectivity.
• Collaborate with ML engineers to balance inference speed, quality, privacy, and responsiveness.
• Design agentic interaction models with clear boundaries between autonomous behavior and user control.
• Represent agent status clearly and enable inspecting, redirecting, pausing, or reversing actions.
• Work with hardware teams to translate interaction requirements into sensor placement, displays, haptics, and form factors.
• Develop spatial systems that adapt to real-time data and communicate state with ambient cues without overload.
• Build high‑fidelity interactive spatial prototypes and simulations to stress-test multi‑agent behaviors.
• Establish rapid feedback loops between field deployments and product/engineering teams.

Skills

UX design

Spatial computing

3D prototyping

Figma

Three.js

WebGL

Unity

Unreal Engine

Edge AI

Education

Master's degree in HCI / UX / AR/VR

Tools

Sensor data analysis (IMUs)

Hardware-software co-design

Prototype frameworks

Job description

Hardware UX Designer Graduate (PICO-Edge AI & Spatial Computing) - 2027 Start

Location:

San Jose

Team:

Technology

Employment Type:

Regular

Job Code:

A98705

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Responsibilities

About the TeamWe are building the future of edge AI — where on-device intelligence meets lightweight, wearable hardware such as Mixed Reality headwear and modular peripherals. As AI shifts from the cloud to the device, our team is focused on solving the "last inch" of physical interaction: making local AI feel natural, responsive, and seamlessly connected to the user's environment. You will work alongside mechanical engineers, industrial designers, ML engineers, optical and sensor teams, and human-factors specialists to ship experiences where hardware form, system behavior, and AI capability function as one coherent product.We are looking for talented individuals to join our team. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth.Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by the end of the year. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.Candidates can apply to a maximum of two positions and will be considered for jobs in the order you apply. The application limit is applicable to our Company and its affiliates' jobs globally. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early.Responsibilities- Partner directly with customers, field teams, engineers, and end users to understand real-world workflows, deployment conditions, and failure points, and translate them into clear UX hypotheses, interaction models, and prototype plans.- Design forward-deployed UX programs that adapt core product capabilities across industries, environments, and user groups without fragmenting the overall experience.- Define how on-device AI communicates system state, confidence, progress, uncertainty, limitations, and required user actions across Small Language Models, local multimodal models, vector embeddings, sensor fusion, and hybrid local-cloud architectures.- Determine which interactions stay local for speed, privacy, reliability, or safety, and which escalate to the cloud, and design graceful degradation under limited connectivity, compute, sensor quality, battery, or model performance.- Collaborate with ML engineers to understand model behavior and translate technical capabilities into predictable user-facing experiences, balancing inference speed, quality, thermal performance, battery, privacy, and responsiveness.- Design agentic interaction models — including intent interpretation, task delegation, confirmation, interruption, cancellation, correction, escalation, and recovery — with clear boundaries between autonomous behavior and explicit user control.- Design understandable representations of agent status (active, waiting, blocked, uncertain, completed, failed, requiring approval) and ensure users can inspect, redirect, pause, or reverse consequential AI actions.- Work with industrial designers, hardware engineers, optical engineers, sensor teams, and human-factors specialists to translate interaction requirements into physical product implications: sensor placement, button location, display behavior, haptics, weight distribution, visibility, and thermal comfort.- Design logic-based spatial systems that adapt dynamically to real-time data and hardware form factors, using ambient, haptic, auditory, and visual cues to communicate model state without overwhelming cognitive load.- Build high-fidelity interactive spatial prototypes and digital simulation frameworks to stress-test multi-agent behaviors against boundary conditions, hallucination spikes, and context-window failures before physical deployment.- Establish rapid feedback loops between field deployments and central product, design, research, and engineering teams, and identify where issues require software, model, hardware, workflow, or user-education changes

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications- Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a Master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Industrial Design, Interaction Design, User Experience (UX), Human Factors Engineering, Design Engineering, Computer Science (HCI/AR/VR focus), Mechanical Engineering (Product Design/Human Factors), Cognitive Science, or a related field.- Experience designing embedded systems, AR/MR hardware, wearable devices, or physical-digital products, demonstrated through academic projects, internships, research, or a portfolio showcasing 3D spatial and physical-form thinking.- Understanding of on-device AI and edge computing concepts, including Small Language Models (SLMs), local vector embeddings, and the tradeoffs between inference speed, battery life, thermal performance, and user experience.- Strong foundation in industrial design, ergonomics, and spatial interaction design, with the ability to consider how digital interfaces integrate with physical hardware constraints and human factors.- Experience collaborating across multidisciplinary teams (e.g., mechanical engineering, industrial design, embedded systems, or AI/ML) through coursework, research, internships, or project-based work to develop hardware-software experiences.- Proficiency in building interactive prototypes using modern UX and 3D prototyping tools (e.g., Figma, Three.js, WebGL, Unity, Unreal Engine, or similar), with familiarity analyzing sensor data (e.g., IMUs, spatial mapping) and an understanding of edge hardware constraints such as NPUs, thermal limits, and memory management.Preferred Qualifications- Experience designing state-driven spatial visualizers and ambient indicators that dynamically construct themselves from multi-agent states, geometric transformations, and real-time environmental conditions.- Familiarity integrating generative workflows directly into engineering tools via protocols such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP), rather than relying on faked interactions or legacy visual scripting.- Experience defining multimodal guardrails for gaze, gesture, and tactile interactions, including clear UX policies for autonomous action versus human override.- Background designing low-latency interrupt and latency-masking patterns for edge-driven agents, using ambient cues to keep users anchored during inference and handoffs.- Experience designing feedback loops for systems that balance objective physical constraints (structural integrity, thermal/computational limits) with subjective human factors (aesthetic preference, physical comfort), including AgentRL-style tuning workflows.- Experience shipping AI, AR, VR, MR, or wearable hardware products from concept through manufacturing.

Job Information

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $76000 - $151200 annually.

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;

2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and

3. Exercising sound judgment.

About Us

Founded in 2012, ByteDance's mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. With a suite of more than a dozen products, including TikTok, Lemon8, CapCut and Pico as well as platforms specific to the China market, including Toutiao, Douyin, and Xigua, ByteDance has made it easier and more fun for people to connect with, consume, and create content.

Why Join ByteDance

Inspiring creativity is at the core of ByteDance's mission. Our innovative products are built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and enrich life - a mission we work towards every day.

As ByteDancers, we strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our Company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.

Diversity & Inclusion

ByteDance is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At ByteDance, our mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.

Reasonable Accommodation

ByteDance is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/RA-request