Manager, Software Engineering

About the role

This position leads the AI Tools team, which builds internal platforms and workflows to increase engineering productivity across Figma. You will oversee the development of cloud agents, sandbox runtimes, and orchestration systems that automate developer tasks. In this role, you will define how AI augments the engineering organization while maintaining a high bar for reliability and security. You will partner closely with product and infrastructure teams to ensure that the tools you build directly support the company's product goals. The position requires a hands-on leader who is comfortable writing code while also thinking strategically about long-term platform design. You will be responsible for turning ambitious ideas into production-grade systems that scale across a global engineering workforce. Success in this role will be measured by the quality, adoption, and impact of the platforms your team delivers.

Key facts

Location: USA

Engagement: Full-time.

Salary: $258,000 to $376,000 USD annually.

Equity, bonus, and comprehensive benefits package included.

Team: AI Tools

What you'll do

• Manage and expand a team focused on AI-driven developer workflows and cloud agent infrastructure.
• Define the technical strategy for AI Developer Experience, covering agent reliability, orchestration, and sandbox runtimes.
• Build team culture, operational processes, and hiring pipelines from the ground up.
• Ensure the scalability, observability, and reliability of the cloud agent platform.
• Collaborate with security, infrastructure, and product engineering teams to identify and implement AI-assisted workflows.
• Research and integrate new AI models, tools, and agent frameworks.
• Create evaluation frameworks to track the cost, impact, and quality of AI-generated code and agentic processes.
• Provide mentorship and career development support to engineers.
• Partner with design and product teams to translate user needs into robust internal tooling.
• Drive the design and evolution of APIs that enable other teams to build on your platforms.
• Implement best practices for secure and efficient deployment of AI workloads in production environments.
• Analyze usage metrics to continuously refine the performance and usability of developer tools.
• Lead postmortems and incident responses to improve system resilience.
• Contribute to open source and industry standards where appropriate to advance the field.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience managing platform, infrastructure, or developer experience teams.
• Strong software engineering background, with Staff-level or higher technical depth in distributed systems and production infrastructure.
• Demonstrated experience building AI/ML systems, LLM workflows, or agent architectures.
• Experience hiring and scaling engineering teams in high-growth settings.
• Ability to manage architectural trade-offs and drive cross-functional alignment.
• Proven track record of delivering complex systems in ambiguous and fast-paced environments.
• Comfort with reviewing large volumes of code and providing thoughtful technical feedback.

Nice to have

• Experience building AI developer tooling or agent platforms.
• Familiarity with agent frameworks like Cursor, Claude Code, or MCP integrations.
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools such as Temporal, n8n, or Tines.
• Background in developer experience platforms, including CI/CD, build tools like Bazel/Blaze, or large monorepos.
• Experience building quality and evaluation frameworks for AI outputs.

Skills & tools

• Distributed systems
• Platform architecture
• LLM-based workflows
• Agent architectures
• AI/ML systems
• Workflow orchestration
• CI/CD and build systems

Practical notes

• Compensation includes equity, an annual bonus plan, and a comprehensive benefits package including health, dental, vision, retirement contributions, and parental leave.
• Candidates must keep cameras on during video interviews.
• In-person onboarding is required upon hire.
• Figma provides reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities; requests can be sent to accommodations-ext@figma.com.

This role represents a significant opportunity to shape the next generation of tools that empower developers around the world. You will be responsible for creating the infrastructure that allows engineering teams to move faster and build with greater confidence. The ideal candidate is a leader who thrives on solving hard problems while maintaining empathy for the day-to-day needs of engineers. You will work closely with executives, product leaders, and individual contributors to ensure that the AI Tools organization delivers measurable value. This position requires a balance of technical excellence, people leadership, and business acumen. If you are passionate about building the future of software development platforms, this role provides the autonomy and resources to make a lasting impact.