Director, Research - AI Evals

About the role

The Figma Research team is hiring an Director, Research - AI Evals to own how we measure the quality of Figma's AI-powered experiences. This role is crucial as Figma ships more AI capabilities across its products, and ensuring these features are of high quality becomes increasingly important.

Responsibilities

• Own AI evaluation methods and operations for Figma's AI-powered experiences — define quality dimensions, design how we measure them, and turn results into decision-ready signal
• Build and maintain evaluation frameworks, rubrics, golden datasets, and quality bars, combining human evaluation with automated/model-based approaches (e.g., LLM-as-judge) where appropriate
• Partner with engineering to stand up repeatable, reproducible evaluation pipelines and regression testing, so evaluation is a routine part of how AI features are built and shipped
• Produce clear readouts and dashboards that let stakeholders confidently make go/no-go and prioritization decisions
• Socialize a shared definition of quality so evaluation standards are adopted across teams rather than re-invented — and advocate for evaluation as a strategic partner in the product process
• Manage a small team to execute our AI evals in partnership with contractors, internal staff, and/or LLMs

Requirements

10+ years of experience in product, research, applied research, or a closely related field, including 2+ years of management experience

Direct, hands-on experience owning the evaluation of AI/LLM-powered products

Expertise designing and running AI evaluation — human evaluation programs, rubric and benchmark/golden-dataset construction, inter-rater reliability — and sound judgment about when and how to apply automated/model-based approaches (e.g., LLM-as-judge), including their limitations

Strength across both qualitative and quantitative methods, comfort with data and metrics, and the ability to reason about model behavior

Demonstrated success in identifying the riskiest assumptions behind an ambiguous quality question, prioritizing them, and designing right-sized evaluation to build confidence

A proven track record of gaining buy-in from executive and cross-disciplinary stakeholders — transcending methodology to articulate a larger user story and the "so what" to inspire action

Qualifications

• Experience building or co-building automated evaluation pipelines and regression testing in partnership with engineering, or familiarity with eval tooling (e.g., Braintrust, LangSmith, DeepEval, or equivalents)
• Experience standing up a new function, practice, or discipline from scratch
• 2+ years in product design, user-centric product management, data science, product development, and/or front-end engineering
• A familiarity and depth of experience using Figma's products

Skills

Experience with Figma's products

Benefits

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.

Pay

Annual Base Salary Range: $258,000—$348,000 USD