Software Engineer - Application Platform

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

We’re looking for an experienced backend engineer with meaningful production Ruby experience who enjoys building for other engineers. You don’t need to be a Ruby language specialist. You should be comfortable making informed tradeoffs in a substantial shared codebase and turning recurring problems into durable systems, tools, and paved paths that improve engineering velocity across the company.

What it asks for · 5

• Bring 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

Also a plus

• Experience with background-job or workflow systems, including retries, idempotency, scheduling, backpressure, isolation, and failure recovery
• Experience with AWS services such as SQS and EKS, workflow systems such as Temporal, or infrastructure tools such as Kubernetes and Terraform
• Experience improving test performance, local development environments, CI systems, or large-scale code migrations

What the job covers

• Design and evolve shared Ruby frameworks for REST APIs, asynchronous jobs, workflow orchestration, and data access
• Improve the 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 and introducing stronger endpoint abstractions and type safety
• 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

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• systems9×
• engineers7×
• ruby7×
• backend6×
• experience6×
• shared6×
• workflow6×
• design5×
• platform5×
• product5×
• engineering4×
• infrastructure4×
• production4×
• code3×
• codebase3×
• improve3×

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.

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