Backend Platform Engineer - Ruby APIs & Async Workflows

Figma; United States; On-site; USD 153,000 - 376,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health insurance

Retirement benefits

Parental leave

Mental health and wellness benefits

Paid time off

Sick leave

Holidays and leave benefits

Job summary

Figma is hiring a backend engineer to join the Application Platform within the Infrastructure organization. You’ll build and evolve Ruby-based frameworks for REST APIs, asynchronous jobs, and data access, shaping scalable, reliable backend platforms used by multiple engineering teams.

You’ll contribute to moving REST APIs from Sinatra toward Rails, improve testing and CI reliability, and mentor other engineers while upholding high technical standards and shared ownership across branches.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years building production systems with Ruby
• Build, maintain, and evolve large Ruby applications and shared backend codebases that support multiple engineering teams
• Design reliable distributed systems at production scale, including APIs, background processing, testing, observability, and operations
• Improve complex, established systems through architecture, modularization, migrations, performance, reliability, or developer tooling
• Create scalable abstractions, navigate technical tradeoffs, and collaborate with and mentor engineers across teams

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve shared Ruby frameworks for REST APIs, asynchronous jobs, workflow orchestration, and data access
• Improve availability, reliability, scalability, and performance of backend systems that support critical product functionality
• Modernize a large Ruby codebase through safe architectural changes, including moving REST APIs from Sinatra toward Rails
• Make backend development faster by improving hot reloading, local workflows, test infrastructure, CI reliability, debugging tools, and iteration speed
• Strengthen the scalability, isolation, observability, and recovery capabilities of Figma’s asynchronous job platform
• Partner with product engineers—your customers—and Infrastructure teams to identify recurring pain points and turn them into reusable platform capabilities
• Establish pragmatic engineering practices through shared libraries, APIs, documentation, tooling, code review, and technical guidance
• Mentor other engineers and contribute to a culture of thoughtful execution, high technical standards, and shared ownership

Skills

Ruby

REST APIs

Asynchronous jobs

Rails

CI/CD

Testing

Observability

Mentor engineers

Distributed systems design

API design

Tools

AWS SQS

AWS EKS

Temporal

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

Figma is hiring a backend engineer to join the Application Platform within the Infrastructure organization. You’ll build and evolve Ruby-based frameworks for REST APIs, asynchronous jobs, and data access, shaping scalable, reliable backend platforms used by multiple engineering teams.

You’ll contribute to moving REST APIs from Sinatra toward Rails, improve testing and CI reliability, and mentor other engineers while upholding high technical standards and shared ownership across branches.