Manager, Software Engineering

About the role

Figma is seeking a leader to manage our Observability engineering team and guide our strategy for system health, performance, and cost transparency. You will oversee a team of five engineers while driving initiatives in AI-driven anomaly detection and operational automation.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Manage and grow a team of five engineers focused on the reliability and scalability of our observability and AI trace platforms.
• Operate the AI Trace Observability ecosystem, including telemetry pipelines, data classification, and evaluation workflows.
• Maintain the core observability stack, including Datadog, to ensure high availability and signal quality across logs, metrics, and traces.
• Establish technical standards for instrumentation, libraries, agents, and operators.
• Implement AI-based methods for signal correlation, root cause analysis, and operational automation.
• Collaborate with security, finance, and product engineering teams to manage system health and infrastructure costs.
• Mentor team members through performance feedback and career development.

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience leading platform, infrastructure, or observability engineering teams.
• Hands-on experience with modern observability tools like Datadog and OpenTelemetry.
• Knowledge of distributed systems, incident response, and SLO design.
• Experience managing cloud infrastructure costs, including budgeting, forecasting, and attribution.
• Ability to drive cross-functional alignment and set technical direction in complex environments.

Nice to have

• Experience building telemetry or evaluation systems for machine learning products, including LLM traces and model versioning.
• Background in designing company-wide observability standards and shared libraries.
• Experience with infrastructure cost optimization and vendor negotiations.
• Familiarity with applying machine learning to automate operational tasks.
• Experience scaling teams through architectural changes.

Skills & tools

• Datadog
• OpenTelemetry
• Distributed systems
• Instrumentation frameworks
• AI/ML observability (LLM traces, prompt versioning)

Practical notes

Compensation includes equity, an annual bonus plan, and a comprehensive benefits package covering health, dental, vision, retirement, and parental leave. We offer flexible PTO, sick leave, and reimbursements for home internet and cell phone use. Candidates must keep cameras on during video interviews and attend in-person onboarding if hired. We provide reasonable accommodations for the application and interview process upon request.