Manager, Software Engineering - Observability

Role details

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. This team ensures that engineers across Figma can detect issues quickly, understand system behavior at scale, and make informed decisions about reliability. The team owns and evolves our core observability stack—including platforms like Datadog, shared instrumentation libraries, the agents and operators that power telemetry collection, and a host of internally developed components to power AI Trace Observability —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, greenfield AI Observability work 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 experie