Manager, Software Engineering - Search & Recommendations

Overview

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!

The Search & Recommendations team builds the search platforms and infrastructure used across Figma. Our team is responsible for providing Figma AI agents with the most relevant context from across the Figma ecosystem—from design system assets to code—in order to complete tasks with high quality and low latency. And, our team maintains features critical to every designer’s workflow, including visual, asset, and file search.

We’re an inter-disciplinary team that works across the stack, from training reranking models to managing our feature store platform to keeping our search infrastructure reliable as we scale.

• Support a team of engineers with skillsets ranging from infrastructure to model development, including hiring and career development.
• Partner with our product engineering, infrastructure, data science, and product management teams to deliver cutting-edge Figma AI features.
• Own the team’s technical strategy, roadmap, and goals.
• Roll up your sleeves as needed to get involved with the technical details and improve execution efficiency.
• Grow your career within an engaged and creative engineering community.
• Build an inclusive, diverse team and culture through hiring, community events, and programs in partnership with teams across Figma.

• 4+ years of engineering management experience leading high-performing, fast-moving teams, ideally in the AI space.
• 8+ years of total engineering experience, ideally reaching a staff engineering level as an individual contributor.
• Prior experience building search, recommendation, or AI systems as an engineering manager or individual contributor.
• A proven track record of motivating, mentoring, and guiding experienced AI engineering leads.

• Expertise in building and maintaining systems built on top of Open Search or Elastic Search.
• Experience working with LLMs at production scale.

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.

If based in Figma’s San Francisco or New York hub offices, this role has the annual base salary range stated below.

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. The listed range is a guideline, and the range for this role may be modified. For roles that are available to be filled remotely, the pay range is localized according to employee work location by a factor of between 80% and 100% of range.

Please discuss your specific work location with your recruiter for more information.

Figma offers equity to employees, as well a competitive package of additional benefits, including health, dental & vision, retirement with company contribution, parental leave & reproductive or family planning support, mental health & wellness benefits, generous PTO, company recharge days, a learning & development stipend, a work from home stipend, and cell phone reimbursement. Figma also offers sales incentive pay for most sales roles and an annual bonus plan for eligible non-sales roles.

Figma’s compensation and benefits are subject to change and may be modified in the future.

Annual Base Salary Range: $250,000 — $350,000 USD

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