Technical Program Manager, AI Research

Figma is a company on a mission to make design accessible to all, and they are seeking a seasoned Technical Program Manager to lead the platform side of their AI initiatives. The role involves managing cross-organizational delivery of key AI services and ensuring infrastructure scales to meet product demands.

Responsibilities:

• Own and drive programs supporting Figma’s AI research and platform — including annotation velocity, evaluation pipelines, and cost/capacity readiness
• Partner with Infra and Finance to plan model scaling across providers: track token usage, forecast traffic, manage regional limits, optimize caching strategies, and reduce latency
• Lead our internal AI Annotation Program: manage vendors and design annotators. Define task priorities, improve quality standards and increase annotator throughput
• Support internal AIOps initiatives — model go/no-go decision making, monitor model behavior, prevent regressions, and ensure readiness across quality gates
• Drive cross-functional execution of key AI-powered product features — coordinate scope, risks, comms, and launch checklists
• Partner with Data Science to maintain and improve internal visibility: annotation metrics, token quotas, reliability dashboards, and evaluation timelines

Requirements:

• 4+ years of technical program management experience (or equivalent) in AI platform, AI research, and AI infrastructure
• Understand how AI gets built and scaled: model evaluation loops, annotation pipelines, quota limits, and data versioning
• Have hands-on experience running AI cost/capacity reviews, forecast planning, and vendor oversight. Deep understanding of model cost mechanics, including token burn, cache hit rates, latency, and quota limits
• Comfort operating in high-ambiguity, high-velocity environments with exec visibility
• Strong writing and communication skills — you bring structure, clarity, and momentum to complex technical programs
• Bring a systems-thinking mindset to the AI delivery pipeline, and know where to tighten loops or increase speed
• Experience with AI vendor contracts, third-party API quotas, or multi-cloud capacity planning
• Background in AIOps / model quality pipelines — even better if you've built or scaled them
• Scaled contractor or external vendor teams delivering core data operations
• Strong bias to action, self-motivation and curiosity, with desire to bring people together and deliver high quality results in the constantly evolving growth and excitement of a start-up culture
• Familiarity with a modern scaled web stack (AWS, Sinatra, React)