Software Engineer - Application Platform

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.

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

• Build or operate background-job and workflow systems, with an understanding of concepts such as retries, idempotency, scheduling, backpressure, isolation, or failure recovery
• Work with cloud and infrastructure technologies such as AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, or workflow systems like Temporal
• Improve developer productivity through test performance, local development workflows, CI, or large-scale code migrations