Design Engineer, Design Systems

Role Overview

Lead and evolve LiveKit's Design System as a Design Engineer, sitting within the Design organization and partnering with Product Engineering. You'll own the core primitives that power the product UI and ensure cohesive, high-quality experiences built to scale.

Key Responsibilities

Design System Leadership

• Lead and evolve the design system roadmap, including components, tokens, foundations, and interaction patterns
• Define and maintain standards for component quality, accessibility, and usability
• Establish governance and contribution models for safe team scaling

Component & Foundation Architecture

• Architect and implement robust, accessible, production-grade UI components
• Maintain design tokens, theming infrastructure, and shared foundations
• Ensure components are performant, composable, and easy to adopt
• Invest in documentation, examples, and tooling to drive adoption

UI Excellence & Consistency

• Partner deeply with designers and engineers to improve visual polish and interaction quality
• Help teams adopt systematic, reusable patterns
• Advocate for best practices in layout, motion, accessibility, and interaction design
• Raise the UI bar across product surfaces (dashboard, core product, docs, developer tooling)

Prototyping & Exploration

• Build high-fidelity prototypes to explore new patterns and validate UX decisions
• Push on motion, micro-interactions, and expressive UI that enhances usability

AI-Native Design Systems

• Shape how AI tools and models consume LiveKit's design system
• Explore ways for LLMs and automation to generate UI using system primitives
• Build tooling so design tokens, components, and patterns are machine-readable and model-friendly
• Think about design systems as inputs to generative workflows

Requirements

• 7+ years of front-end engineering or design engineering experience
• Strong design taste with deep care for layout, motion, affordances, and visual polish
• Expertise in TypeScript, React, Tailwind, component-driven architectures, and accessibility best practices
• Proven experience building or maintaining design systems (components, tokens, docs, governance, tooling)
• Portfolio demonstrating UI engineering craft, component thinking, and prototyping ability
• Systems mindset with focus on primitives, abstractions, and reusable patterns
• Excellent cross-functional communication and influence skills

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with LLMs generating UI or consuming design systems
• Built tooling that enables AI to compose interfaces from structured components
• Thinking about design systems as inputs to generative or agentic workflows
• Deep curiosity about human + AI collaboration in design and UI engineering