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Figma is seeking an experienced backend engineer to join the Application Platform team within the Infrastructure organization. This team builds shared foundations that enable engineers across Figma to ship backend product work quickly, safely, and reliably.
You will own and evolve a large Ruby application that powers Figma's REST APIs, asynchronous jobs, and workflow orchestration systems. These systems sit on critical production paths and directly shape the engineering experience for backend teams company-wide.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and evolve shared Ruby frameworks for REST APIs, asynchronous jobs, workflow orchestration, and data access patterns
- Improve availability, reliability, scalability, and performance of backend systems supporting critical product functionality
- Modernize the large Ruby codebase through safe architectural changes, including migrating REST APIs from Sinatra to Rails and introducing stronger abstractions and type safety
- Accelerate backend development 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 and Infrastructure teams to identify recurring pain points and build reusable platform capabilities
- Establish pragmatic engineering practices through shared libraries, APIs, documentation, tooling, and technical guidance
- Mentor other engineers and contribute to a culture of thoughtful execution and high technical standards
Required qualifications: 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with 3+ years building production systems in Ruby. You should have experience building, maintaining, and evolving large Ruby applications and shared backend codebases supporting multiple teams. Strong background in designing reliable distributed systems at production scale, including APIs, background processing, testing, observability, and operations. Demonstrated ability to improve complex established systems through architecture, modularization, migrations, performance optimization, or developer tooling. Comfortable creating scalable abstractions, navigating technical tradeoffs, and collaborating with engineers across teams.
Desired experience includes background-job or workflow systems (retries, idempotency, scheduling, backpressure, isolation, failure recovery), AWS services (SQS, EKS), workflow systems like Temporal, infrastructure tools (Kubernetes, Terraform), and experience improving test performance, local development environments, CI systems, or large-scale code migrations.
