Software Engineer - Databases at Figma

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!

The Databases team is responsible for the stateful distributed systems that power all of Figma’s applications. As Figma continues to rapidly grow, the biggest challenge we face is scaling our database systems while balancing reliability. The team is taking a novel approach to Postgres sharding that requires engineers with strong distributed systems experience. Check out our latest blog post on how Figma built its in-house horizontally scalable Postgres stack. Additionally, we plan to ramp up our investments in a Streaming platform built on top of Kafka and a Caching platform on top of  Redis.

We are looking for engineers who are excited about scaling stateful distributed systems, and who have an eye for building simple abstractions to offer our database systems to the rest of the engineering org at Figma.

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

What youll do at Figma:

• Design, build and operate scalable database systems.

• Improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes.

• Collaborate with infrastructure and product teams to define simple interfaces that improve developer velocity while supporting our scalable database products.

• Help debug production issues across services and multiple levels of the stack.

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

• 5+ years of experience building infrastructure components / services at scale.

• Experience building and scaling distributed systems as an individual contributor and/or team lead.

• Proven track record of successfully shipping and landing high-quality products in high growth environments.

• Mentorship experiences with both junior and senior engineers.

• Experience communicating and working across multiple teams and functions to deliver solutions.

• Excellent technical communication skills.

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

• Experience building out and operating database clusters or stateful systems at scale.

• Experience with running Postgres, MySQL, Redis or other database technologies in a production environment.

• Experience building and operating core, “critical path” production services.

• Experience building out distributed systems in high-performance server-side languages like Golang, Rust, Java or C++. 

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

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.

Annual Base Salary Range (SF/NY Hub):

$149,000 - $350,000 USD