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Software Engineer - Creation Engine

San Francisco, CA • New York, NY • Seattle, WA • United States

Figma is growing our team of passionate people on a mission to make design accessible to all. Born on the Web, Figma helps entire product teams brainstorm, design and build better products — from start to finish. Whether it’s consolidating tools, simplifying workflows, or collaborating across teams and time zones, Figma makes the design process faster, more efficient, and fun while keeping everyone on the same page. From great products to long-lasting companies, we believe that nothing great is made alone—come make with us!

Our Creation Engine teams work on some of the core technologies that power our real time, browser-based Figma Design and FigJam products.  These teams work mostly (but not exclusively) on client-side code that runs in the browser.  Under the hood, Figma shares a lot of similarities to a game engine.  We develop this C++/WebAssembly engine to ensure internal and external developers can rapidly build new products and features that are fast and reliable by default. We're always looking for ways to make our platform more extensible, more performant, less resource intensive, and more reliable.  We own areas such as our in-memory data model (SceneGraph), renderer, multiplayer client/server protocols, and plugins and REST API.

This is a full time role that can be held from one of our US hubs or remotely in the United States.


What you'll do at Figma:

  • Regularly collaborate with designers, PMs, and other engineers beyond your team (or org) to plan features that unblock adoption across new categories of customers, and to break down high level goals into tasks and timelines
  • Build, document, and maintain tests, features, and infrastructure
  • Regularly communicate and document architectural designs and requirements
  • Provide thoughtful feedback to others on the team and facilitate spaces of learning, belonging, and impact
  • Help interview and recruit more talented engineers to Figma
  • Modularize our C++/Wasm engine to support new features in Figma Design and FigJam, as well as unlock the development of future product
  • Extend our multiplayer protocols to enable more advanced editing and collaboration modes across files
  • Create frameworks to maintain performance and memory standards across our products —we want to keep pushing the limits of what it's possible to create in a browser while maintaining a highly performant UX
  • Improve our file load times by dynamically loading needed content, optimizing our client-server protocols, and exploring ways to allow users to interact with files earlier
  • Optimize our renderer in order to increase frame rate during periods of heavy interaction with FigJam
  • Provide rich abstractions and APIs between our React/Typescript and C++/Wasm engine, or
  • Expand the way our users can extend the functionality of our products through plugins and widgets, our REST API, as well through new ML-powered extensibility features

We’d love to hear from you if you have:

  • At least 2+ years of professional experience shipping features or products with specialization in web frontend frameworks or C++/Wasm
  • Experience working on game engines, client side technologies and platforms, API products/integrations, and/or developer tools
  • Demonstrated coding fluency with one or more programming languages in a working context, including but not limited to: Typescript/Javascript, C++, React, Ruby, Java, Python, Go, or Rust
  • Experience communicating and collaborating regularly and effectively with designers, PMs, engineers, and stakeholders beyond your team (or org) to plan features and break down high level goals into tasks and timelines,
  • A growth mindset and experience investing in the learning, development, belonging, and impact of your peers

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

  • 2+ years of experience operating in a hands-on technical lead capacity, ideally with multi-team purview 
  • A passion for and experience with driving product direction and developing product platforms

Pay Transparency Disclosure

If based in Figma’s San Francisco or New York hub offices, this role has the annual base salary range stated below.  

Job level and actual compensation will be decided based on factors including, but not limited to, individual qualifications objectively assessed during the interview process (including skills and prior relevant experience, potential impact, and scope of role), market demands, and specific work location. The listed range is a guideline, and the range for this role may be modified. For roles that are available to be filled remotely, the pay range is localized according to employee work location by a factor of between 80% and 100% of range. Please discuss your specific work location with your recruiter for more information. 

Figma offers equity to employees, as well a competitive package of additional benefits, including health, dental & vision, retirement with company contribution, parental leave & reproductive or family planning support, mental health & wellness benefits, generous PTO, company recharge days, a learning & development stipend, a work from home stipend, and cell phone reimbursement.  Figma also offers sales incentive pay for most sales roles. Figma’s compensation and benefits are subject to change and may be modified in the future. You may view our Pay Transparency Policy by clicking on the corresponding link.

Annual Base Salary Range (SF/NY Hub):

$180,000 - $350,000 USD

At Figma we celebrate and support our differences. We know employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, our product and our community to flourish. Figma is an equal opportunity workplace - we are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity/expression, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.

We will work to ensure individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to apply for a role, participate in the interview process, perform essential job functions, and receive other benefits and privileges of employment. If you require accommodation, please reach out to accommodations-ext@figma.com. These modifications enable an individual with a disability to have an equal opportunity not only to get a job, but successfully perform their job tasks to the same extent as people without disabilities. 

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