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# Design Engineer (Founding Engineer)

- **Company:** TIKTOK US INC.
- **Location:** San Jose, CA, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $121,600.0 - $272,000.0
- **Contract:** Temporary contract
- **Skills:** Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Artificial Intelligence, Apple IOS, Code Generation, Cursor (Graphical User Interface Elements), Lynx, Open Source Technology, Software Product Management, Swiftui, Backend, Data Layers, Kotlin
- **Published:** September 3, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.themuse.com/jobs/tiktok/senior-design-engineer-founding-engineer-tiktok

## About the Role

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 (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/practice from scratch
 - Strong product thinking, able to drive ambiguous problems all the way to shipped impact, 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 TikTok and creator communities

## Description

About the team
TikTok UX team is responsible for the product design of the TikTok app. Our key vertical ownership areas include Core app Product Infrastructure, Social, Creation, and Design Systems. Providing professional design methods and practices, the team helps improve user experience and working efficiency of these products and areas.

 1. 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
 2. Explore aggressively - Run multiple feasibility tracks for new workflows and tooling in parallel, rather than picking one and grinding
 3. 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
 4. 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
 5. 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


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