Design Engineer — App Store & Games Product Design Team

Apple Apple · Big Tech · Cupertino, CA · Design

Design Engineer for Apple's App Store & Games Product Design Team, focusing on engineering infrastructure, tooling, and workflows for AI-assisted design and prototype development. The role involves building and shipping production-quality prototypes, working with Swift/SwiftUI and web technologies, and collaborating with design and engineering teams. The position emphasizes staying at the forefront of AI-assisted development and enabling designers with robust engineering practices.

What you'd actually do

  1. You will join us at a pivotal moment. AI-assisted development has fundamentally changed what our team can build and how fast we can build it.
  2. This is a new kind of role for our team: a deeply technical builder embedded within our design organization, responsible for the engineering infrastructure, tooling, and workflows that enable our designers to build and ship production-quality prototypes.
  3. You will work alongside technically-minded designers who will be your closest collaborators, and define how our team works with code.
  4. You will architect and structure code projects so that designers can contribute effectively.
  5. You will stay at the frontier of AI-assisted development, evaluating new tools and helping the team maintain its technical edge.

Skills

Required

  • 5+ years of software engineering experience
  • strong proficiency in iOS/macOS development (Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit)
  • Equally strong proficiency with web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript/TypeScript, React or similar)
  • Strong proficiency with Git, CI/CD pipelines, and developer infrastructure including TestFlight, code signing, and build distribution
  • Experience architecting codebases for collaboration — establishing patterns, documentation, and structure that enable others to build on top of your work
  • Experience integrating with APIs, backend services, and data pipelines
  • Demonstrated fluency with AI-assisted development tools, with a clear perspective on how these tools are changing engineering workflows
  • Excellent communication skills and the ability to translate between design and engineering contexts with clarity
  • Experience working within or closely alongside design teams, with a genuine appreciation for design craft, visual quality, and interaction detail

Nice to have

  • Experience with Core Animation, Core Graphics, Metal, or advanced motion and animation frameworks
  • Familiarity with machine learning pipelines, personalization systems, or recommendation engines, and the ability to interface with these systems to improve user-facing experiences
  • Experience setting up and managing internal tools, developer platforms, or prototype distribution systems
  • Previous experience mentoring or enabling non-engineers in technical workflows
  • Experience working in environments where design and engineering boundaries are intentionally blurred
  • Familiarity with spec-driven development practices
  • A deep understanding of the Apple design aesthetic, Human Interface Guidelines, and platform conventions

What the JD emphasized

  • AI-assisted development has fundamentally changed what our team can build and how fast we can build it.
  • deeply technical builder embedded within our design organization
  • responsible for the engineering infrastructure, tooling, and workflows
  • enable our designers to build and ship production-quality prototypes
  • stay at the frontier of AI-assisted development
  • evaluating new tools
  • maintain its technical edge
  • senior, independent role
  • significant autonomy to define technical standards, establish workflows, and shape the future of how design and engineering collaborate