Manager, Software Engineering - AI Observability

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.

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 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.

• 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.

While not required, it’s an added plus if you also have:

• 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.

Pay Transparency Disclosure

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.

PTO is subject to manager approval. Additional benefits may include company recharge days, cell phone and home internet reimbursements, and a number of lifestyle spending accounts. Figma also offers sales incentive compensation for most sales roles and an annual bonus plan for eligible non-sales roles.

All compensation and benefits are subject to applicable plan terms and may be modified by Figma at any time, consistent with applicable law.

Annual Base Salary Range:

$258,000—$376,000 USD

At Figma we celebrate and support our differences. We know employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, our product and our community to flourish. Figma is an equal opportunity workplace - we are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity/expression, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

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.