PhD Intern, Software Engineer - Interaction Design (2027)

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!

Figma’s Interaction Design team helps designers express how interactive experiences behave from a single interaction, to a multi-state flow, to a series of complex animated transitions. We’re interested in making complex interactive behavior easier to author, refine and understand. This team investigates and identifies new ways to visualize and manage state, animations, interactions, and prototypes through click-through and code-backed experiences.

As a PhD intern, you’ll combine HCI research with hands-on-engineering to help define the next generation of interactive experience design tooling. You’ll work closely with a mentor and teammates and get to learn, contribute, and grow in a supportive environment, while applying your research background to drive real-world impact.

This 12 or 16-week internship for Summer 2027 will be based out of our San Francisco or New York hub.

What you’ll do at Figma:

• Be fully embedded onto a Figma team working on problems that intersect with your research area
• Drive projects that apply research insights to meaningful product challenges
• Collaborate with engineers, PMs, designers, and researchers to scope and execute your work
• Develop, validate, and document solutions from prototypes to production-ready systems
• Share your expertise through presentations, design reviews, and cross-functional collaboration
• Deliver a project with real impact by the end of your internship

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

• Current enrollment as a 4th or 5th year senior PhD student pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related field
• Demonstrated ability to translate complex research concepts into practical, scalable solutions
• A track record of rigorous problem-solving through academic or applied research
• Proficiency in at least one general purpose coding language

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

• A creative portfolio of work consisting of time-based media, animation, game development, digital illustration, or another creative field.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills, with demonstrated experience collaborating across functions
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude) to write, debug, and optimize code
• Applied engineering skills via industry experience, prior internships or similar experience
• First-author publications in top academic conferences related to our team’s focus areas

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.