The urban lifeline engineering system, serving as a key infrastructure that ensures the daily lives of residents, the functional operation of the city, the healthy development of the economy, and the long-term stability of society, is the cornerstone of resilient city construction. Research on seismic resilience assessment methods for urban lifeline engineering systems has achieved certain progress both domestically and internationally. However, the seismic resilience design methods for urban lifeline engineering systems remain underdeveloped. This paper expounds on the concept of seismic resilience design for urban lifeline engineering systems and delineates the differences between seismic resilience design for urban lifeline engineering systems and traditional seismic design for individual urban lifeline facilities. The basic framework of seismic resilience design, characterized by the “two dimensions”, is put forward, which ensures the structural seismic safety of individual facilities through the structural safety design of individual facilities, and guarantees the post-earthquake functionality and rapid recovery of the engineering system through the resilience coordinated design among individual facilities. The basic requirements for seismic resilience design, characterized by the “three objectives”, are established, ensuring structural seismic safety of individual facilities, meeting predetermined functionality of individual facilities and the engineering system, and enabling rapid recovery of the engineering system. The key steps of seismic resilience design, characterized by the “four components” are proposed, which include determining the seismic resilience goals for the engineering system, structural safety design for individual facilities, post-earthquake functionality verification for the engineering system, and identification of technologies and strategies for the rapid recovery of the engineering system. A unified seismic resilience design approach for urban lifeline engineering systems is established. This paper takes a road transportation system as an example to conduct seismic resilience design. The preliminary results validated the rationality and feasibility of the proposed seismic resilience design approach. The design approach enables the transition of seismic design for urban lifeline engineering systems from structural seismic design, which ensures the structural seismic safety of individual facilities, to seismic resilience design, which ensures post-earthquake functionality and rapid recovery of the engineering system. The proposed approach can also provide a practical solution to improve their seismic resilience.