Design Engineer; Founding Engineer - TikTok

Location:

San Jose

Employment Type:

Regular

Job Code: A20076A

• 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.

Minimum 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, Swift
  
  UI or Android / Kotlin, Compose) and working knowledge of backend (APIs, services, data layer).
• 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 or practice from scratch.
• Strong product thinking, able to drive ambiguous problems all the way to shipped impact.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background spanning both design and engineering (designer‑turned‑engineer, or engineer with formal design training or shipped design work).
• Public craft signal – open source contributions, conference talks, published tooling, or a notable public presence around your work.
• Experience with Lynx, or other cross‑platform mobile frameworks.
• Experience shipping social, creator, or content products at scale.
• Passion for Tik Tok and creator communities.

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $121,600 - $288,000 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; this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.