Manager, Software Engineering - Observability

Figma · San Francisco

Software Engineeringposted 6mo ago

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 Observability engineering team builds and operates the systems that give us deep visibility into the health, performance, and efficiency of our platform. From metrics, logs, and traces to cost attribution and budgeting, this team ensures that engineers across Figma can detect issues quickly, understand system behavior at scale, and make informed decisions about reliability and spend. The team owns and evolves our core observability stack—including platforms like Datadog, shared instrumentation libraries, and the agents and operators that power telemetry collection—while continuously raising the bar on signal quality and operational clarity.

This team ensures that engineers across Figma can detect issues quickly, understand system behavior at scale, and make informed decisions about reliability. The team owns and evolves our core observability stack—including platforms like Datadog, shared instrumentation libraries, the agents and operators that power telemetry collection, and a host of internally developed components to power AI Trace Observability —while continuously raising the bar on signal quality and operational clarity.

As the Engineering Manager for Observability, you will lead a team of five engineers responsible for shaping the future of visibility and efficiency at Figma. You’ll define the strategy for instrumentation standards and cost transparency, drive initiatives to optimize observability footprint and spend, and explore innovative AI-driven approaches to anomaly detection and operational automation. This role is well-suited for a leader with strong distributed systems experience who is motivated by platform leverage, cross-functional impact, greenfield AI Observability work and building systems that enable every engineering team to operate with confidence and precision.

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:

Lead and grow a team of 5 engineers responsible for the reliability, scalability, and evolution of Figma’s Observability and AI Trace Observability platforms.
Own and operate the AI Trace Observability ecosystem, including a safe telemetry pipeline that aggregates all relevant data, runs it through classification and then gives engineers the ability to run evals against this data.
Own and operate Figma’s core observability stack, including vendor platforms such as Datadog, ensuring high availability, strong data quality, and effective signal-to-noise across metrics, logs, and traces.
Define and drive the technical strategy for instrumentation standards, observability libraries, agents, and operators used to monitor internal and external facing services.
Explore and implement innovative, AI-driven approaches to anomaly detection, root cause analysis, signal correlation, and operational automation.
Partner with infrastructure, product engineering, finance, and security teams to improve visibility into system health and cost efficiency at scale.
Coach and mentor engineers through career development, performance feedback, and technical leadership, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and high quality execution.

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

4+ years of experience leading infrastructure, observability, or platform engineering teams, with a track record of delivering highly reliable production systems
Deep hands-on experience with modern observability platforms (e.g., Datadog, OpenTelemetry) across metrics, logs, and distributed tracing
Strong understanding of distributed systems, instrumentation best practices, SLO design, and incident response workflows
Experience driving cost transparency and accountability initiatives, including cost attribution, budgeting, forecasting, and alerting in cloud environments
Demonstrated ability to set technical direction, drive cross-functional alignment (Engineering, Finance, Security), and make sound architectural decisions in complex environments

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

Experience building observability, telemetry, data infrastructure, or evaluation systems for AI or machine learning products, including familiarity with LLM traces, prompt and model versioning, classifiers, and offline or online eval workflows.
Experience designing or evolving company-wide observability standards, shared libraries, and agent/operator-based integrations.
Background in cost optimization for infrastructure or observability tooling, including vendor negotiations and usage modeling.
Experience applying AI or machine learning techniques to anomaly detection, root cause analysis, or operational automation.
Familiarity with OpenTelemetry and modern instrumentation frameworks across multiple programming languages.
Experience scaling and mentoring high-performing engineering teams through platform expansion or significant architectural change.

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.

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.

Annual Base Salary Range:

$258,000—$376,000 USD

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.