Design Engineer, Design Systems

LiveKit is building the infrastructure layer for the voice-driven era of computing. Our platform gives developers everything they need to build, test, deploy, scale, and observe agents in production. Founded in 2021, LiveKit powers voice AI applications for OpenAI, xAI, Salesforce, Coursera, Spotify, and thousands of others, collectively facilitating billions of calls each year.

About This Role

We're looking for a Design Engineer to lead and evolve LiveKit's Design System, sitting within the Design org and partnering deeply with Product Engineering.

You'll own the primitives that power our product UI — components, tokens, motion patterns, accessibility standards, and tooling — ensuring LiveKit's product experience is cohesive, high-quality, and built to scale.

This role is ideal for someone who:

• Thinks in systems, abstractions, and primitives
• Has deep UI engineering experience and a high standard for visual quality, interaction design, and usability
• Cares deeply about craft, performance, and ergonomics
• Is excited about making design systems AI-native, so both humans and models can build with them

Your work will primarily support product surfaces (dashboard, core product, docs, developer tooling).

What You'll Own & Drive
Lead and evolve the design system

• Own the roadmap for LiveKit's design system, including components, tokens, foundations, and interaction patterns
• Define and maintain standards for component quality, accessibility, and usability
• Establish governance and contribution models so teams can scale safely

Build primitives for scale and quality

• 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 system adoption

Raise the UI bar across product

• Partner deeply with designers and engineers to improve visual polish, interaction quality, and cross-product consistency
• Help teams move to systematic, reusable patterns
• Advocate for best practices in layout, motion, accessibility, and interaction design

Prototype and explore advanced interactions

• Build high-fidelity prototypes to explore new patterns, validate UX decisions, and influence product direction
• Push on motion, micro-interactions, and expressive UI where it enhances usability and clarity

Make the system AI-native

• Help shape how AI tools and models consume LiveKit's design system
• Explore ways for LLMs and automation to generate UI using system primitives
• Build or influence tooling so design tokens, components, and patterns are machine-readable and model-friendly
• Think about how design systems can become inputs to generative workflows, not just humans

Who You Are

You'd be a great fit if you have:

• 7+ years of experience in front-end engineering or design engineering
• 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
• Experience building or maintaining design systems (components, tokens, docs, governance, tooling)
• A portfolio that demonstrates UI engineering craft, component thinking, and prototyping ability
• A systems mindset — you think in primitives, abstractions, and reusable patterns, not one-off solutions
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence cross-functionally

Nice-to-have: AI-Native Experience

We're especially excited if you:

• Have experimented with LLMs generating UI or consuming design systems
• Have built tooling that lets AI compose interfaces from structured components
• Are thinking about how design systems become inputs to generative or agentic workflows
• Have deep curiosity about the future of human + AI collaboration in design and UI engineering

Our Commitment to You

We aim to build a team where people can do the best work of their careers, with:

• High trust and autonomy
• A strong bar for craft and quality
• Real influence over product direction
• Space to explore ambitious technical and design ideas

Compensation Range: $120K - $250K

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