Manager, Software Engineering - Observability

Figma is growing our team of passionate creatives and builders on a mission to make design accessible to all. Figma’s Observability engineering team builds and operates the systems that give us deep visibility into the health, performance, and efficiency of our platform. As the Engineering Manager for Observability, you will lead a team of five engineers responsible for shaping the future of visibility and efficiency at Figma. This is a full time role that can be held from one of our US hubs or remotely in the United States.

Responsibilities

Lead and grow a team of 5 engineers responsible for the reliability, scalability, and evolution of Figma’s Observability and AI Trace Observability platforms; Own and operate the AI Trace Observability ecosystem, including a safe telemetry pipeline that aggregates all relevant data, runs it through classification and then gives engineers the ability to run evals against this data; Own and operate Figma’s core observability stack, including vendor platforms such as Datadog, ensuring high availability, strong data quality, and effective signal-to-noise across metrics, logs, and traces; Define and drive the technical strategy for instrumentation standards, observability libraries, agents, and operators used to monitor internal and external facing services; Explore and implement innovative, AI-driven approaches to anomaly detection, root cause analysis, signal correlation, and operational automation; Partner with infrastructure, product engineering, finance, and security teams to improve visibility into system health and cost efficiency at scale; Coach and mentor engineers through career development, performance feedback, and technical leadership, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and high quality execution

Requirements

4+ years of experience leading infrastructure, observability, or platform engineering teams, with a track record of delivering highly reliable production systems; Deep hands-on experience with modern observability platforms (e.g., Datadog, OpenTelemetry) across metrics, logs, and distributed tracing; Strong understanding of distributed systems, instrumentation best practices, SLO design, and incident response workflows; Experience driving cost transparency and accountability initiatives, including cost attribution, budgeting, forecasting, and alerting in cloud environments; Demonstrated ability to set technical direction, drive cross-functional alignment (Engineering, Finance, Security), and make sound architectural decisions in complex environments

Nice to have

Experience building observability, telemetry, data infrastructure, or evaluation systems for AI or machine learning products, including familiarity with LLM traces, prompt and model versioning, classifiers, and offline or online eval workflows; Experience designing or evolving company-wide observability standards, shared libraries, and agent/operator-based integrations; Background in cost optimization for infrastructure or observability tooling, including vendor negotiations and usage modeling; Experience applying AI or machine learning techniques to anomaly detection, root cause analysis, or operational automation; Familiarity with OpenTelemetry and modern instrumentation frameworks across multiple programming languages; Experience scaling and mentoring high-performing engineering teams through platform expansion or significant architectural change

Benefits

Equity; Health, dental, and vision coverage; Retirement benefits with company contributions; Parental leave and reproductive or family planning support; Mental health and wellness benefits; Paid time off; Paid sick leave; Holidays; Other leave benefits; Flexible PTO for exempt employees; Company recharge days; Cell phone and home internet reimbursements; Lifestyle spending accounts; Annual bonus plan for eligible non-sales roles