What is the salary range for the Manager, Software Engineering - Observability role at Figma?

The salary range for the Manager, Software Engineering - Observability position at Figma is USD 258k-376k/yr.

Where is the Manager, Software Engineering - Observability role at Figma located?

The Manager, Software Engineering - Observability position at Figma is based in San Francisco, CA • New York, NY • United States; Canada; US. This is an on-site position.

What type of employment is the Manager, Software Engineering - Observability role at Figma?

The Manager, Software Engineering - Observability position at Figma is a Full time role.

What experience is required for the Manager, Software Engineering - Observability role at Figma?

The Manager, Software Engineering - Observability position at Figma requires 4+ yrs exp.

What skills are required for the Manager, Software Engineering - Observability role at Figma?

Key skills for the Manager, Software Engineering - Observability position at Figma include: figma, machine learning.

Manager, Software Engineering - Observability — Figma

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 Observability engineering team builds and operates the systems that give us deep visibility into the health, performance, and efficiency of our platform. From metrics, logs, and traces to cost attribution and budgeting, this team ensures that engineers across Figma can detect issues quickly, understand system behavior at scale, and make informed decisions about reliability and spend. The team owns and evolves our core observability stack—including platforms like Datadog, shared instrumentation libraries, and the agents and operators that power telemetry collection—while continuously raising the bar on signal quality and operational clarity.

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. You’ll define the strategy for instrumentation standards and cost transparency, drive initiatives to optimize observability footprint and spend, and explore innovative AI-driven approaches to anomaly detection and operational automation. This role is well-suited for a leader with strong distributed systems experience who is motivated by platform leverage, cross-functional impact, and building systems that enable every engineering team to operate with confidence and precision.

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 team of engineers responsible for the reliability, scalability, and evolution of Figma’s observability and cost engineering platforms
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
Establish clear frameworks for cost attribution, budgeting, forecasting, and alerting across infrastructure and observability spend, enabling teams to make informed tradeoffs
Partner with infrastructure, product engineering, finance, and security teams to improve visibility into system health and cost efficiency at scale
Lead initiatives to optimize observability footprint and spend, balancing depth of insight with performance and cost considerations
Coach and mentor engineers through career development, performance feedback, and technical leadership, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and high quality execution

We'd love to hear from you if you have:

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

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

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

At Figma, one of our values is Grow as you go. We believe in hiring smart, curious people who are excited to learn and develop their skills. If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with the points outlined in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Pay Transparency Disclosure

If based in Figma’s San Francisco or New York hub offices, this role has the annual base salary range stated below.

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.

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

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. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.

We will work to ensure individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to apply for a role, participate in the interview process, perform essential job functions, and receive other benefits and privileges of employment. If you require accommodation, please reach out to [email protected]. These modifications enable an individual with a disability to have an equal opportunity not only to get a job, but successfully perform their job tasks to the same extent as people without disabilities.

Examples of accommodations include but are not limited to:

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.

By applying for this job, the candidate acknowledges and agrees that any personal data contained in their application or supporting materials will be processed in accordance with Figma's Candidate Privacy Notice.

Manager, Software Engineering - Observability

Job description