Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

Figma is a collaborative design platform that helps teams bring ideas to life and work together in real time. The Software Engineer on the Infrastructure team will design, build, and operate scalable distributed systems supporting Figma’s collaborative design tools, while improving developer experience, reliability, and platform strategy. The role also involves cross-functional collaboration, production debugging, and mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and maintain scalable and reliable infrastructure systems that support product innovation and user collaboration at scale
• Architect and evolve distributed systems including storage platforms, streaming infrastructure, and compute orchestration
• Improve developer experience by building internal platforms, CI/CD systems, build tools, and APIs
• Collaborate across product and infrastructure teams to design secure, maintainable, and performant systems
• Participate in shaping platform strategy, roadmaps, and engineering best practices across the organization
• Debug and resolve complex production issues that span services and layers of the stack
• Mentor engineers and foster a culture of collaboration, inclusivity, and technical excellence

Requirements:

• 5+ years of Software Engineering experience, specifically in backend or infrastructure engineering
• Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts such as sharding, replication, consistency, and eventual convergence
• Experience with cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure), infrastructure-as-code, and container orchestration
• Proficiency in languages such as Go, TypeScript, Python, Rust, or Ruby
• Strong system design skills and a track record of architecting resilient production systems
• Excellent communication skills, with experience collaborating across teams and mentoring others
• Experience scaling storage platforms (e.g., Postgres, Redis, S3, DynamoDB) or operating streaming systems like Kafka
• Background in traffic management, DDoS mitigation, or service mesh technologies (e.g., Envoy, Istio)
• A history of developing complex, realtime distributed systems at scale
• A passion for building developer productivity tools, including development environments, CI/CD pipelines, and build systems
• Experience with evolving large-scale, shared developer platforms to improve reliability and developer velocity
• Strong problem-solving skills and a bias for action—especially when tackling high-impact, gritty challenges