Inside Figma’s Engineering Culture
Inside Figma’s Engineering Culture
A deep dive into how the dev team works at Figma and their “build with deliberation, build with pride” engineering culture. As told by Figma’s CTO, Kris Rasmussen.
Figma is a design platform for teams to build products. Founded in 2012, the company launched its first paid product in 2016, which exploded in popularity for Figma to become the market-leading designer collaboration tool it is today.
In September 2022, Adobe acquired Figma for $20B, in what was Adobe’s biggest acquisition to date. At the time of publishing, Figma employs more than 1,000 people, and about 300 of these work in tech.
Clearly, Figma has done plenty of things right to become the go-to tool for designers, out-competing companies including Sketch and Adobe. I was interested to learn how the company operates from an engineering perspective, and what inspiration other tech companies could take from Figma. So I reached out to CTO Kris Rasmussen, who was generous in sharing his insights during a conversation which lasted more than two hours.
In this issue, we dig into the engineering culture at Figma, as Kris walks us through these topics:
The engineering team’s evolution and what’s unique about Figma’s culture.
Engineering structure: pillars, platform teams, EM/engineer ratios.
Getting things done. Exploration vs execution, the planning process and prioritizing fixing bugs.
The engineering culture. Dogfooding, experimentation, quality weeks, onboarding engineers and internal mobility.
The engineering career ladder. When and how it was built, and its levels.
The tech stack. React, TypeScript and C++ on the frontend; Ruby, Go and TypeScript on the backend.
Engineering challenges. Client-side performance, distributed databases and scale.
Tech can be a small world, and in 2016 when at Uber I worked on a major app rewrite with Yuhki Yamashita, who’s Figma’s Chief Product Officer. He shares details on how Figma builds products in
, which is a nice accompaniment to this issue from a product point of view.With that, it’s over to CTO Kris, who shares details on the engineering side of things at Figma. What follows are his words.