TikTok
Senior Design Engineer (Founding Engineer) - TikTok
San Jose, California · Senior · Full-time · Posted Oct 28, 2026
About the job
Build AI-powered design tools and improve the workflow from product design through production-quality mobile and full-stack implementation at TikTok.
What you'll do
- Improve design-to-engineering handoffs and explore multiple workflow and tooling approaches.
- Integrate design-delivered code into production, including design system components, performance, and accessibility.
- Build internal AI design tools and guide architecture, design system evolution, and the tooling roadmap.
What they ask for
- Experience shipping production mobile or full-stack systems, with deep expertise in at least one mobile stack and working knowledge of backend systems.
- Hands-on use of AI coding agents and experience building or shipping AI product features or agent-based workflows.
- Founding or early-team experience, or evidence of shaping a team or practice from scratch.
- Strong problem-solving and product thinking, including driving ambiguous problems to shipped impact.
Nice to have
- Background spanning design and engineering, public craft contributions, or experience with Lynx or other cross-platform mobile frameworks.
- Experience shipping social, creator, or content products at scale; passion for TikTok and creator communities.
Tools
iOS, Swift, SwiftUI, Android, Kotlin, Compose, Cursor, Claude Code
AI focus
Architect and ship internal AI design tooling, including agents, design system plugins, code-generation pipelines, and prototyping platforms; build or ship AI product features or agent-based workflows.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative