Manager, Software Engineering - AI Observability

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

As the Engineering Manager for Observability, you'll lead the team building the systems that show Figma how its platform and its AI products actually behave in production. That spans our core observability stack, meaning metrics, logs, and distributed tracing, as well as a fast-growing new frontier: the AI observability pipeline that turns traces, conversations, and model outputs into the classification and evals that make Figma's AI features measurably better. You'll set strategy across both, raise the bar on instrumentation and data quality, and push into AI-driven approaches to anomaly detection and operational automation. Observability was an unowned space at Figma until recently, so this is a rare chance to shape an early-stage, high-leverage platform that every engineering team here depends on.

What it asks for · 5

• 4+ years of experience leading and growing engineering teams in infrastructure, observability, platform, or AI systems, with a track record of delivering reliable production systems at scale.
• A strong foundation in distributed systems and a platform mindset: you build systems other teams adopt and rely on, not just for your own team.
• Hands-on depth in observability, AI systems telemetry, or both, whether that means metrics, logs, and distributed tracing, or the traces, classification, and evals that power AI products.
• Fluency with the modern tooling in your area, such as Datadog, OpenTelemetry, and Prometheus, or LLM tracing, prompt and model versioning, and eval workflows.
• A high operational bar (instrumentation and data quality, SLO design, incident response) and the ability to set technical direction and drive cross-functional alignment in complex environments.

Also a plus

• Breadth across both classic observability and AI observability, or the curiosity to grow into whichever is newer to you.
• Experience creating AI Telemetry-assisted improvement feedback loops for services, in particular for AI products and features.
• Experience improving infrastructure efficiency, including cost attribution, forecasting, vendor negotiation, and usage modeling.
• A track record designing company-wide observability standards, shared libraries, and agent or operator-based integrations.
• Experience applying AI or machine learning to anomaly detection, root cause analysis, or operational automation.
• Experience scaling and mentoring high-performing teams through platform expansion or major architectural change.

What the job covers

• Lead and grow a 6 engineer team responsible for the reliability, scalability, and evolution of Figma's observability and AI observability platforms.
• Own and evolve the AI observability ecosystem: a privacy-safe telemetry pipeline that aggregates trace, conversation, and model data, runs classification, and lets teams run evals to measure and improve AI feature quality.
• Own Figma's core observability stack, including platforms like Datadog, ensuring high availability, strong data quality, and a healthy signal-to-noise ratio across metrics, logs, and traces.
• Set the technical strategy for the instrumentation standards, libraries, agents, and operators that monitor services across the company.
• Explore and ship AI-driven approaches to anomaly detection, root cause analysis, signal correlation, and operational automation.
• Partner across infrastructure, product engineering, finance, and security to give teams clear visibility into system health at scale, including cost efficiency as the team's scope grows.
• Coach and develop engineers through career growth, feedback, and technical leadership, building a culture of ownership and high-quality execution.

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• observability13×
• platform8×
• systems7×
• experience5×
• products5×
• design4×
• engineering4×
• evals4×
• traces4×
• anomaly detection3×
• classification3×
• data quality3×
• features3×
• grow3×
• infrastructure3×
• metrics logs3×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

More open at Figma

• Account Executive, EnterpriseSan Francisco, CA • New York, NY • United States
• Account Executive, Enterprise (Bengaluru, India)Bengaluru, India
• Account Executive, Enterprise (Berlin, Germany)Berlin, Germany
• Account Executive, Enterprise (London, United Kingdom)London, England
• Account Executive, Enterprise, Mandarin Speaking (Singapore)Singapore
• Account Executive, Enterprise (São Paulo, Brazil)São Paulo, Brazil