Software Engineer - Application Platform

Figma•San Francisco, CA

2h•$153,000 - $376,000•Remote

About The Position

Figma is growing its team of passionate creatives and builders on a mission to make design accessible to all. Figma’s platform helps teams bring ideas to life—whether you're brainstorming, creating a prototype, translating designs into code, or iterating with AI. From idea to product, Figma empowers teams to streamline workflows, move faster, and work together in real time from anywhere in the world. The Application Platform team is part of Product Platform within Figma’s Infrastructure organization. They build shared foundations that help engineers ship backend product work quickly, safely, and reliably. The team owns a large Ruby application that powers Figma’s REST APIs, asynchronous jobs, and workflow orchestration. Their systems sit on critical production paths and shape the day-to-day experience of backend engineers across Figma. They are looking for an experienced backend engineer with meaningful production Ruby experience who enjoys building for other engineers. The ideal candidate should be comfortable making informed tradeoffs in a substantial shared codebase and turning recurring problems into durable systems, tools, and paved paths that improve engineering velocity across the company.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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

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