Software Engineer - Application Platform

Figma is a design and collaboration platform helping teams bring ideas to life and work together in real time. The Application Platform team is seeking an experienced backend engineer to build shared Ruby frameworks, improve backend reliability and scalability, modernize the Ruby codebase, and create tools that increase engineering velocity. The role also involves partnering with product and infrastructure engineers, establishing engineering practices, and mentoring other engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Design and evolve shared Ruby frameworks for REST APIs, asynchronous jobs, workflow orchestration, and data access
• Improve the availability, reliability, scalability, and performance of backend systems that support critical product functionality
• Modernize a large Ruby codebase through safe architectural changes, including moving REST APIs from Sinatra toward Rails and introducing stronger endpoint abstractions and type safety
• Make backend development faster by improving hot reloading, local workflows, test infrastructure, CI reliability, debugging tools, and iteration speed
• Strengthen the scalability, isolation, observability, and recovery capabilities of Figma’s asynchronous job platform
• Partner with product engineers—your customers—and Infrastructure teams to identify recurring pain points and turn them into reusable platform capabilities
• Establish pragmatic engineering practices through shared libraries, APIs, documentation, tooling, code review, and technical guidance
• Mentor other engineers and contribute to a culture of thoughtful execution, high technical standards, and shared ownership

Requirements:

• Bring 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years building production systems with Ruby
• Build, maintain, and evolve large Ruby applications and shared backend codebases that support multiple engineering teams
• Design reliable distributed systems at production scale, including APIs, background processing, testing, observability, and operations
• Improve complex, established systems through architecture, modularization, migrations, performance, reliability, or developer tooling
• Create scalable abstractions, navigate technical tradeoffs, and collaborate with and mentor engineers across teams
• Experience with background-job or workflow systems, including retries, idempotency, scheduling, backpressure, isolation, and failure recovery
• Experience with AWS services such as SQS and EKS, workflow systems such as Temporal, or infrastructure tools such as Kubernetes and Terraform
• Experience improving test performance, local development environments, CI systems, or large-scale code migrations