Software Engineer - Application Platform

Figma•San Francisco, NY

About The Position

Figma’s Application Platform team, part of Product Platform within the Infrastructure organization, builds shared foundations that help engineers ship backend product work quickly, safely, and reliably. The team owns a large Ruby application powering Figma’s REST APIs, asynchronous jobs, and workflow orchestration. These systems support critical production paths and shape backend engineers’ day-to-day experience. Figma is seeking an experienced backend engineer with meaningful production Ruby experience who enjoys building for other engineers. The role involves 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. This is a full-time role based at a US hub or remotely within the United States.

Requirements

At least 5 years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 3 years building production systems with Ruby.
Experience building, maintaining, and evolving large Ruby applications and shared backend codebases that support multiple engineering teams.
Experience designing reliable distributed systems at production scale, including APIs, background processing, testing, observability, and operations.
Experience improving complex, established systems through architecture, modularization, migrations, performance, reliability, or developer tooling.
Ability to create scalable abstractions, navigate technical tradeoffs, and collaborate with and mentor engineers across teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience building or operating background-job and workflow systems, with knowledge of retries, idempotency, scheduling, backpressure, isolation, or failure recovery.
Experience with cloud and infrastructure technologies such as AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, or workflow systems such as Temporal.
Experience improving developer productivity through test performance, local development workflows, CI, 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.
Improve hot reloading, local workflows, test infrastructure, CI reliability, debugging tools, and iteration speed to make backend development faster.
Strengthen the scalability, isolation, observability, and recovery capabilities of Figma’s asynchronous job platform.
Partner with product engineers 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.

Benefits

Equity for employees.
Health, dental, and vision coverage.
Retirement benefits with company contributions.
Parental leave and reproductive or family planning support.
Mental health and wellness benefits.
Paid time off, including paid sick leave, holidays, and other leave benefits in accordance with applicable laws.
Employer-provided paid flexible PTO for exempt employees, subject to manager approval.
Company recharge days may be offered.
Cell phone and home internet reimbursements may be offered.
Lifestyle spending accounts may be offered.
Annual bonus plan for eligible non-sales roles.