Software Engineer, Distributed Systems
Design, build, and operate scalable distributed systems powering Figma's real-time collaborative design platform. Requires 5+ years backend/infrastructure experience, distributed systems expertise, and cloud proficiency.
About the job
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, realtime 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.
Skills
Go, TypeScript, Python, Rust, Ruby, AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, Postgres
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