Design Engineer, Design Systems

LiveKit

About The Position

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).

Requirements

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 Haves

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

Responsibilities

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