Strategic Overview
Software Engineer - Application Platform at Figma is defined by the responsibilities and candidate requirements in the employer's listing.
The published role emphasizes work such as Design and evolve shared Ruby frameworks for REST APIs, asynchronous jobs, workflow orchestration, and data access.
The role is listed for San Francisco, CA • New York, NY • United States, giving candidates the practical context needed to assess fit before applying.
Key information at a glance
About This Role
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.
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.
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.
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- 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
Required Qualifications & Candidate Blueprint
- 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
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: $235,000 – $376,000 USD
- Figma offers equity to employees, as well as a competitive package of additional benefits, including health, dental, and vision coverage; retirement benefits with company contributions; parental leave and reproductive or family planning support; mental health and wellness benefits; and paid time off.
Salary Benchmark
This role’s published compensation is compared with active employer-disclosed ranges for the same role, in the same currency and pay period.
Benchmark uses active employer job postings in our database, excludes this listing, and matches the currency and pay period. It is not a third-party salary estimate; currencies are not converted.
Full Job Description
The following is the complete job description supplied by the source. We sanitize unsafe markup and remove external links, but do not shorten or rewrite the employer's source content.
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.
This is a full time role that can be held from one of our US hubs or remotely in the United States.
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
Pay Transparency Disclosure
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.
Figma offers equity to employees, as well as a competitive package of additional benefits, including health, dental, and vision coverage; retirement benefits with company contributions; parental leave and reproductive or family planning support; mental health and wellness benefits; and paid time off. Figma provides paid sick leave, holidays, and other leave benefits in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws, including the requirements of the Washington Minimum Wage Act and related regulations. Exempt employees are eligible for employer‑provided paid flexible PTO in addition to flexible paid sick leave. PTO is subject to manager approval. Additional benefits may include company recharge days, cell phone and home internet reimbursements, and a number of lifestyle spending accounts. Figma also offers sales incentive compensation for most sales roles and an annual bonus plan for eligible non-sales roles. All compensation and benefits are subject to applicable plan terms and may be modified by Figma at any time, consistent with applicable law.
At Figma we celebrate and support our differences. We know employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, our product and our community to flourish. Figma is an equal opportunity workplace - we are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity/expression, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.
We will work to ensure individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to apply for a role, participate in the interview process, perform essential job functions, and receive other benefits and privileges of employment. If you require accommodation, please reach out to accommodations-ext@figma.com. These modifications enable an individual with a disability to have an equal opportunity not only to get a job, but successfully perform their job tasks to the same extent as people without disabilities.
Examples of accommodations include but are not limited to:
- Holding interviews in an accessible location
- Enabling closed captioning on video conferencing
- Ensuring all written communication be compatible with screen readers
- Changing the mode or format of interviews
To ensure the integrity of our hiring process and facilitate a more personal connection, we require all candidates keep their cameras on during video interviews. Additionally, if hired you will be required to attend in person onboarding.
By applying for this job, the candidate acknowledges and agrees that any personal data contained in their application or supporting materials will be processed in accordance with Figma's Candidate Privacy Notice.
Application limits: To help candidates focus on the opportunities most relevant to their skills and experience, Figma limits the number and frequency of applications. These limits apply to all roles:
- Candidates may submit up to 5 applications during any rolling 30-day period.
- Candidates may not reapply to the same role while an application is active or within 90 days of receiving a rejection.
Once the applicable days has passed, candidates are welcome to apply again.
Editor’s Market Perspective (Our Custom Analysis)
Why This Position Matters
This opening may suit candidates who can demonstrate experience relevant to the employer's published requirements. Its strongest career signal is the scope of the work itself — particularly Design and evolve shared Ruby frameworks for REST APIs, asynchronous jobs, workflow orchestration, and data access — rather than a generic title alone.
Resume & Application Strategy
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