Software Engineer, Figma

Creation Engine

$180-350k

+ Equity; Salary applicable to candidates based in NY/SF Hubs only and may vary by other locations; For roles that are available to be filled remotely, the pay range is localized according to employee work location by a factor of between 80% and 100% of range

React
TypeScript
JavaScript
Python
Java
Go
Figma
Ruby
C++
Rust
REST API
Junior and Mid level
Remote in US
New York
San Francisco Bay Area
Figma

Design platform for product teams

Open for applications

Figma

Design platform for product teams

1001+ employees

B2BEnterpriseInternal toolsDesignSaaSProduct Management

Open for applications

$180-350k

+ Equity; Salary applicable to candidates based in NY/SF Hubs only and may vary by other locations; For roles that are available to be filled remotely, the pay range is localized according to employee work location by a factor of between 80% and 100% of range

React
TypeScript
JavaScript
Python
Java
Go
Figma
Ruby
C++
Rust
REST API
Junior and Mid level
Remote in US
New York
San Francisco Bay Area

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

  • At least 2+ years of professional experience shipping features or products with specialization in web frontend frameworks or C++/Wasm
  • Experience working on game engines, client side technologies and platforms, API products/integrations, and/or developer tools
  • Demonstrated coding fluency with one or more programming languages in a working context, including but not limited to: Typescript/Javascript, C++, React, Ruby, Java, Python, Go, or Rust
  • Experience communicating and collaborating regularly and effectively with designers, PMs, engineers, and stakeholders beyond your team (or org) to plan features and break down high level goals into tasks and timelines,
  • A growth mindset and experience investing in the learning, development, belonging, and impact of your peers

Desirable

  • 2+ years of experience operating in a hands-on technical lead capacity, ideally with multi-team purview
  • A passion for and experience with driving product direction and developing product platforms

What the job involves

  • Our Creation Engine teams work on some of the core technologies that power our real time, browser-based Figma Design and FigJam products
  • These teams work mostly (but not exclusively) on client-side code that runs in the browser
  • Under the hood, Figma shares a lot of similarities to a game engine
  • We develop this C++/WebAssembly engine to ensure internal and external developers can rapidly build new products and features that are fast and reliable by default
  • We're always looking for ways to make our platform more extensible, more performant, less resource intensive, and more reliable. We own areas such as our in-memory data model (SceneGraph), renderer, multiplayer client/server protocols, and plugins and REST API
  • Regularly collaborate with designers, PMs, and other engineers beyond your team (or org) to plan features that unblock adoption across new categories of customers, and to break down high level goals into tasks and timelines
  • Build, document, and maintain tests, features, and infrastructure
  • Regularly communicate and document architectural designs and requirements
  • Provide thoughtful feedback to others on the team and facilitate spaces of learning, belonging, and impact
  • Help interview and recruit more talented engineers to Figma
  • Modularize our C++/Wasm engine to support new features in Figma Design and FigJam, as well as unlock the development of future product
  • Extend our multiplayer protocols to enable more advanced editing and collaboration modes across files
  • Create frameworks to maintain performance and memory standards across our products —we want to keep pushing the limits of what it's possible to create in a browser while maintaining a highly performant UX
  • Improve our file load times by dynamically loading needed content, optimizing our client-server protocols, and exploring ways to allow users to interact with files earlier
  • Optimize our renderer in order to increase frame rate during periods of heavy interaction with FigJam
  • Provide rich abstractions and APIs between our React/Typescript and C++/Wasm engine, or
  • Expand the way our users can extend the functionality of our products through plugins and widgets, our REST API, as well through new ML-powered extensibility features

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 at Welcome to the Jungle

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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