Lead the engineering team owning Figma's sharded Postgres storage layer and database platform

Figma is hiring an Engineering Manager for its Databases team, which owns the foundational data layer behind every Figma file, component, comment, and collaboration session — sharded Postgres clusters, migration tooling, provisioning, and higher-level data products like caching and streaming. The manager will lead engineers, own reliability/on-call culture for the data tier, set technical direction, and champion AI-assisted tooling for database operations. Requires 4+ years managing infrastructure/platform/backend teams and proven technical depth in distributed, stateful systems; base salary $258K-$376K in SF/NYC hubs.

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What this interview tests

Technical depth in distributed, stateful systems (sharded Postgres, replication, migrations)
Building on-call culture, incident response, and postmortem practices for critical infrastructure
People management: coaching, promotions, difficult performance conversations
Prioritizing platform reliability vs. competing product-team demands
Bringing AI/LLM-assisted tooling into database operations safely

Common question themes

How would you evaluate a proposed sharding or migration strategy without doing the implementation yourself

Tell me about maturing an on-call or incident-response process for a stateful system

Describe coaching an engineer through a promotion or a hard performance conversation

How do you prioritize reliability investment against demands from many dependent product teams

How would you introduce AI-assisted migration safety checks without adding risk

How do you set technical direction for a foundational platform team you don't personally code on daily

How candidates describe it

Real Manager interview stories — retold from candidates' public write-ups, with sources.

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