Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

Software Engineer, Distributed Systems at Figma

Figma is rapidly expanding its team of passionate creatives and builders, all united by a mission to make design accessible to everyone. Figma’s platform empowers teams to bring ideas to life, from initial brainstorming and prototype creation to translating designs into code and iterating with AI. Our platform enables teams to streamline workflows, accelerate development, and collaborate in real-time from any location worldwide. If you are eager to shape the future of design and collaboration, we invite you to join us!

At Figma, infrastructure is fundamental to everything we develop. As a Software Engineer, Distributed Systems on our Infrastructure team, you will be instrumental in designing, building, and operating the high-scale systems that power our real-time collaborative design tools, used by millions globally. As we scale rapidly, we are seeking experienced distributed systems engineers across various teams. Whether your passion lies in storage, compute orchestration, developer tooling, networking, or real-time data systems, this role offers a unique opportunity to shape the technical foundation of one of the world's most cherished design platforms.

This is a full-time position that can be based out of one of our US hub offices or performed remotely within the United States.

What You’ll Do at Figma

• 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.

We’d Love to Hear From You If You Have

• 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.

While it’s not required, it’s an added plus if you also have

• 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, real-time 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.

Key skills/competency

• Distributed Systems
• Scalable Infrastructure
• Real-time Collaboration
• Cloud-Native
• Developer Experience
• CI/CD
• System Design
• Data Streaming
• Container Orchestration
• Backend Engineering