Manager, Software Engineering - Observability

About the role

Figma is growing its team of software engineers to build and operate the systems that give deep visibility into the health, performance, and efficiency of the Figma platform. The Observability team ensures that engineers across Figma can detect issues quickly, understand system behavior at scale, and make informed decisions about reliability and spend.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of engineers responsible for the reliability, scalability, and evolution of Figma’s observability and cost engineering platforms
• Own and operate Figma’s core observability stack, including vendor platforms like 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
• Establish clear frameworks for cost attribution, budgeting, forecasting, and alerting across infrastructure and observability spend, enabling teams to make informed tradeoffs
• Partner with infrastructure, product engineering, finance, and security teams to improve visibility into system health and cost efficiency at scale
• Lead initiatives to optimize observability footprint and spend, balancing depth of insight with performance and cost considerations
• Coach and mentor engineers through career development, performance feedback, and technical leadership, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and high quality execution

Requirements

• 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

Qualifications

• 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

Skills

• Strong communication and interpersonal skills
• Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced, dynamic environment
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Experience with DevOps tools and practices

Benefits

Figma offers a competitive package of 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

The annual base salary range for this role is $258,000 - $376,000 USD. 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.

Schedule

This is a full-time role that can be held from one of Figma’s US hubs or remotely in the United States.