Manager, Software Engineering - Storage Platform

DATABASE, INCORPORATED
San Francisco, United States of America
5 days ago

Role details

Contract type
Permanent contract
Employment type
Full-time (> 32 hours)
Working hours
Regular working hours
Languages
English
Experience level
Senior
Compensation
$ 258K

Job location

Remote
San Francisco, United States of America

Tech stack

Artificial Intelligence
Databases
Data Infrastructure
Relational Databases
Shard (Database Architecture)
Programming Tools
Distributed Systems
PostgreSQL
MySQL
Screen Reader
Software Engineering
Large Language Models
Backend
Figma

Job description

As the Engineering Manager of this team, you'll lead engineers who are the last line of defense for Figma's most critical stateful systems - and the first to build the next generation of database infrastructure as Figma scales. You'll partner closely with product engineering teams across the company, own reliability and performance for our data tier, and shape how we integrate AI into database operations.

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

What you'll do at Figma:

  • Lead and develop engineers responsible for Figma's core database infrastructure, including sharded Postgres clusters, schema management, migrations tooling, and database provisioning
  • Own the reliability and operational excellence of Figma's data tier - drive incident response, postmortem culture, and proactive investment in system resilience
  • Set technical direction and roadmap for the area, balancing reliability investments with platform capabilities that accelerate product engineering teams
  • Partner with product and engineering leadership to prioritize work across competing demands - this is a foundational platform team that every product team depends on
  • Recruit, retain, and grow top infrastructure engineering talent - build a team culture where engineers do the best work of their careers
  • Drive execution through clear planning, regular reviews, and transparent communication of progress and risks to stakeholders
  • Collaborate with peer engineering managers across Infrastructure on shared operational standards and cross-cutting initiatives
  • Champion the adoption of AI-assisted tooling to improve developer experience around database operations - from schema guidance to automated migration safety checks, * Experience managing managers or leading multiple teams across related technical domains
  • Experience defining org-wide technical vision and strategy across multiple work streams
  • Hands-on experience operating relational databases at scale (Postgres or MySQL) - including sharding, replication, and migration strategies
  • Familiarity with AI/LLM-assisted developer tooling and how it can transform infrastructure operations
  • Background in adjacent infrastructure domains (caching, streaming/event processing, observability) that complement the database layer
  • Experience at a high-growth product company where infrastructure needed to evolve rapidly alongside the product, * Holding interviews in an accessible location
  • Enabling closed captioning on video conferencing
  • Ensuring all written communication be compatible with screen readers
  • Changing the mode or format of interviews

To ensure the integrity of our hiring process and facilitate a more personal connection, we require all candidates keep their cameras on during video interviews. Additionally, if hired you will be required to attend in person onboarding.

Requirements

  • 4+ years of experience managing infrastructure, platform, or backend engineering teams
  • Proven technical depth in distributed systems, stateful infrastructure, or data-intensive backend systems, with a track record of earning credibility with senior engineers and making informed technical tradeoffs
  • Demonstrated ability to ramp quickly on unfamiliar technical domains and apply strong engineering fundamentals
  • Track record of building or improving on-call culture, incident response processes, and reliability practices for production systems
  • Experience developing engineers' careers - you've coached people through promotions, navigated difficult performance conversations, and built teams that people want to join
  • Comfort leading distributed teams across multiple time zones, Job level and 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. Please discuss your specific work location with your recruiter for more information.

Benefits & conditions

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. Figma also offers sales incentive pay for most sales roles and an annual bonus plan for eligible non-sales roles. Figma's compensation and benefits are subject to change and may be modified in the future. Annual Base Salary Range: $258,000-$376,000 USD

About the company

Figma is growing our team of passionate creatives and builders on a mission to make design accessible to all. Figma's platform helps teams bring ideas to life-whether you're brainstorming, creating a prototype, translating designs into code, or iterating with AI. From idea to product, Figma empowers teams to streamline workflows, move faster, and work together in real time from anywhere in the world. If you're excited to shape the future of design and collaboration, join us! Figma's Databases team owns the foundational data layer that powers every Figma file, component, comment, and collaboration session. We operate sharded Postgres clusters at scale, build the tooling that keeps database operations safe and fast (schema migrations, provisioning, operational guardrails), and develop higher-level data products like distributed caching and streaming infrastructure.

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