Software Engineer - Application Platform

About this role

Figma is growing our 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. If you're excited to shape the future of design and collaboration, join us!

Application Platform is part of Product Platform within Figma’s Infrastructure organization. We 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. Our systems sit on critical production paths and shape the day-to-day experience of backend engineers across Figma.

We’re looking for an experienced backend engineer with meaningful production Ruby experience who enjoys building for other engineers. You don’t need to be a Ruby language specialist. You 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.

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:

• 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

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

• Bring 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

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

• 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

At Figma, one of our values is Grow as you go. We believe in hiring smart, curious people who are excited to learn and develop their skills. If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with the points outlined in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Pay Transparency Disclosure

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.

Figma offers equity to employees, as well as a competitive package of additional benefits, including health, dental, and vision coverage; retirement benefits with company contributions; parental leave and reproductive or family planning support; mental health and wellness benefits; and paid time off. Figma provides paid sick leave, holidays, and other leave benefits in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws, including the requirements of the Washington Minimum Wage Act and related regulations. Exempt employees are eligible for employer‑provided paid flexible PTO in addition to flexible paid sick leave. PTO is subject to manager approval. Additional benefits may include company recharge days, cell phone and home internet reimbursements, and a number of lifestyle spending accounts. Figma also offers sales incentive compensation for most sales roles and an annual bonus plan for eligible non-sales roles. All compensation and benefits are subject to applicable plan terms and may be modified by Figma at any time, consistent with applicable law.

Annual Base Salary Range: $153,000 — $376,000 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/expres

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