Software Engineer, Figma

Design at Scale

$219-350k

+Equity. Salary shown is for SF/NY applicants only

React
CSS
TypeScript
Redux
HTML
JavaScript
Python
Java
Go
Figma
Ruby
C++
C
Rust
Objective-C
Sinatra
Senior and Expert level
New York
San Francisco Bay Area

1-3 days a week in office

Figma

Design platform for product teams

Open for applications

Figma

Design platform for product teams

1001+ employees

B2BEnterpriseInternal toolsDesignSaaSProduct Management

Open for applications

$219-350k

+Equity. Salary shown is for SF/NY applicants only

React
CSS
TypeScript
Redux
HTML
JavaScript
Python
Java
Go
Figma
Ruby
C++
C
Rust
Objective-C
Sinatra
Senior and Expert level
New York
San Francisco Bay Area

1-3 days a week in office

1001+ employees

B2BEnterpriseInternal toolsDesignSaaSProduct Management

Company mission

Figma's mission is to help teams create, share, test, and ship better designs from start to finish.

Role

Who you are

  • 6+ years of professional experience building and shipping user-facing features and products, or platforms that power multiple features, including 2+ years of experience operating in a technical lead capacity
  • Strong ability to understand user experiences and product requirements and translate into high quality technical solutions
  • Deep understanding of systems and proven ability to solve problems without known solutions or creates new architecture that solves multiple problems within complex systems
  • Demonstrated fluency with one or more programming languages, including: Typescript/Javascript, React, C++, Python, Java, Objective-C, Go, or Rust
  • Excellent technical communication and relationship-building skills. The ability to achieve successful outcomes with partners ranging from interns to executives
  • A growth mindset and experience investing in the learning, development, belonging, and impact of your peers

Desirable

  • Experience in and a desire to teach fellow engineers through pairing, code review, and in-the-moment feedback
  • Experience working on editors
  • Experience writing C++ (or related languages such as Objective C or C) in a user-facing context (e.g. gaming, native applications)
  • Experience in building frontend platforms or frameworks

What the job involves

  • Within the Figma Editor, Figma’s industry-leading collaborative design product, Design Systems is one of the most critical features that enables teams to scale their designs
  • Every day, our users leverage design systems to create, share and reuse design elements, in order to ensure design consistency across their brand and products and accelerate a designer’s workflow
  • The Design Systems team is responsible for providing powerful features and delightful user experiences for the life cycle of building, managing and consuming design systems
  • Design Systems is a full stack product, hence it fully leverages the Figma Editor’s technical stack: everything you see on the canvas in the Figma Editor uses C++, which compiles to WebAssembly to run in the browser and offer more control over performance, memory management, and rendering
  • We use Typescript and React/Redux for the UI around the canvas, where key elements like the properties panel, toolbar, and modals live. Typescript gives us type checking capability, more guardrails around code correctness, and allows us to generate HTML and CSS in order to take advantage of more standard UI patterns
  • We have a service-oriented architecture and use Ruby/Sinatra, Go, and Rust on the backend for Figma’s main API server. Professional experience with these languages and technologies is not a requirement. We encourage candidates to use the programming language that they’re most comfortable with during interviews—new hires will be ramped in our codebase during onboarding
  • Figma is a highly collaborative organization. You’ll form strong relationships with product managers and designers, and can expect to partner regularly with engineers and leaders beyond your immediate team
  • Building new features in a real time, multiplayer system with a complex data model that enables collaboration across files
  • Designing large-scale application architecture and state management
  • Solving for performance and memory optimizations—we want to keep pushing the limits of what is possible to create in a browser while maintaining a highly performant UX
  • Extending and scaling the Editor and full stack system behind our design system features, enabling teams to build best-in-class design systems that work well with production components
  • Contributing to mapping out an accessibility strategy, which may include improvements to the Figma UI (contrast, keyboard navigability, etc.) as well as tools to help people generate accessible content as they do their own work

Our take

Figma is a web-based design platform that helps cross-functional teams of designers, project managers, and developers easily collaborate on product design projects. Its standout feature, Multiplayer mode, is like Google Docs for design, letting team members collaborate in real-time on project files that are hosted in the cloud.

Founded in 2012, Figma quickly established itself among its competitors in the sector and achieved a valuation exceeding $10 billion in 2021, boosted by a trend towards remote work. Its acquistion by Adobe for twice that amount just a year later raised eyebrows, but is a testament to the huge potential of this company and its product.

Thousands of industry-leading companies such as AirBnB, Dropbox, GitHub and Microsoft use Figma to scale their design efforts easily across distributed teams. Adobe has committed to leaving Figma autonomous going forward, and Figma will benefit from Adobe's digital imaging and AI tech in its product development.

Kirsty headshot

Kirsty

Company Specialist

Insights

Top investors

Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks

97% employee growth in 12 months

Company

Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)

May 2024

$415.7m

SERIES F

Jan 2022

$0.5m

SERIES E

Total funding: $749.1m

Company benefits

  • Equity
  • Health, Dental, & Vision
  • Retirement with company contribution
  • Parental leave & fertility support
  • Mental health and wellness benefits
  • Generous PTO
  • Company recharge days
  • Learning & development stipend
  • Work from home stipend
  • Cell phone reimbursement

Company values

  • Build community
  • Run with it
  • Love your craft
  • Grow as you go

Company HQ

Union Square, San Francisco, CA

Leadership

Previous Research Assistant at Microsoft for 1 year. Spent 2.5 years at Brown University pursuing a CS/Math degree, dropping out with the support of the Thiel Fellowship, when he earnt a grant of $100,000 to pursue entrepreneurial projects.

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