Manager, Software Engineering - Storage Platform

What you’ll do at Figma:

• Lead and develop engineers responsible for Figma's core database infrastructure, including sharded Postgres clusters, schema management, migrations tooling, and database provisioning
• Own the reliability and operational excellence of Figma's data tier — drive incident response, postmortem culture, and proactive investment in system resilience
• Set technical direction and roadmap for the area, balancing reliability investments with platform capabilities that accelerate product engineering teams
• Partner with product and engineering leadership to prioritize work across competing demands — this is a foundational platform team that every product team depends on
• Recruit, retain, and grow top infrastructure engineering talent — build a team culture where engineers do the best work of their careers
• Drive execution through clear planning, regular reviews, and transparent communication of progress and risks to stakeholders
• Collaborate with peer engineering managers across Infrastructure on shared operational standards and cross-cutting initiatives
• Champion the adoption of AI-assisted tooling to improve developer experience around database operations — from schema guidance to automated migration safety checks

Requirements:

• 4+ years of experience managing infrastructure, platform, or backend engineering teams
• Proven technical depth in distributed systems, stateful infrastructure, or data-intensive backend systems, with a track record of earning credibility with senior engineers and making informed technical tradeoffs
• Demonstrated ability to ramp quickly on unfamiliar technical domains and apply strong engineering fundamentals
• Track record of building or improving on-call culture, incident response processes, and reliability practices for production systems
• Experience developing engineers' careers — you've coached people through promotions, navigated difficult performance conversations, and built teams that people want to join
• Comfort leading distributed teams across multiple time zones

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience managing managers or leading multiple teams across related technical domains
• Experience defining org-wide technical vision and strategy across multiple work streams
• Hands-on experience operating relational databases at scale (Postgres or MySQL) — including sharding, replication, and migration strategies
• Familiarity with AI/LLM-assisted developer tooling and how it can transform infrastructure operations
• Background in adjacent infrastructure domains (caching, streaming/event processing, observability) that complement the database layer
• Experience at a high-growth product company where infrastructure needed to evolve rapidly alongside the product