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Infrastructure

From multi-day latency to near real-time insights: Figma’s data pipeline upgrade
May 29, 2025
By Yichao Zhao
After an exponential growth in users and data, daily synchronization tasks started taking hours or even days to complete. Here’s how rebuilding a data pipeline reduced latency to near real-time.
Inside Figma
Engineering
Infrastructure
The infrastructure behind AI search in Figma
October 15, 2024
By Isaac Goldberg, Maggie Zhou
To build AI search in Figma, we had to tackle a number of technical hurdles, including the challenge of generating and indexing billions of embeddings to power these features—while also keeping costs down.
Inside Figma
Engineering
AI
Infrastructure
The search for speed in Figma
October 10, 2024
By Scott Laird
Our months-long investigation into slow search speeds led to a solution that not only improved performance but also set the foundation for future scale.
Inside Figma
Engineering
Quality & performance
Infrastructure
Behind the scenes
How we migrated onto K8s in less than 12 months
August 8, 2024
By Ian VonSeggern
Migrating onto Kubernetes can take years. Here’s why we decided it was worth undertaking, and how we moved a majority of our core services in less than 12 months, all while making our compute platform easier to use.
Inside Figma
Engineering
Infrastructure
What is minimum viable data?
June 26, 2024
By Herbert Lui
As many focus on the possibilities and limitations of AI tools and their output, Ovetta Sampson reminds us to pay attention to the power of the input.
Insights
AI
Thought leadership
Design thinking
Infrastructure
Keeping it 100(x) with real-time data at scale
May 17, 2024
By Arushi Bandi
After years of playing catch-up with Figma’s growth, it was time to fundamentally rethink LiveGraph’s architecture.
Inside Figma
Engineering
Infrastructure
The evolution of Figma’s mobile engine: Compiling away our custom programming language
May 1, 2024
By Brandon Lin
We’ve long written core parts of our mobile rendering architecture in Skew, the custom programming language we invented to squeeze additional performance out of our playback engine. Here’s how we automatically migrated Skew to TypeScript without disrupting a single day of development.
Inside Figma
Quality & performance
Engineering
Infrastructure
Behind the scenes
Speeding up C++ build times
April 25, 2024
By Isabel Ren, Kunal Desai
When we learned that engineers were losing hours building our C++ codebase, we jumped into investigating the root cause. Here’s how we cut build times in half and shipped a solution for scale.
Inside Figma
Engineering
Infrastructure
Quality & performance
How Figma’s databases team lived to tell the scale
March 14, 2024
By Sammy Steele
Our nine month journey to horizontally shard Figma’s Postgres stack, and the key to unlocking (nearly) infinite scalability.
Inside Figma
Engineering
Infrastructure
Behind the scenes
Quality & performance
How we built a custom permissions DSL at Figma
March 13, 2024
By Jorge Silva
When our permissions system came apart at the seams, everything came to a halt. This is the story of how we fixed it while improving performance, accuracy, and developer ergonomics.
Inside Figma
Engineering
Infrastructure
Behind the scenes
Quality & performance
How Thumbtack structures their design system
July 13, 2023
By Daniel O'Connor
Staff Software Engineer Daniel O'Connor peels back the layers of the home service platform's design system, Thumbprint, to show how they built it for flexibility and efficiency.
Maker Stories
Design systems
Productivity
Case study
React
Engineering
Infrastructure
How Figma draws inspiration from the gaming world
May 3, 2023
By Alice Ching
Engineering Manager Alice Ching discusses the parallels between developing gaming interfaces and building Figma and FigJam, and why our tech stack is more similar to a game engine’s tech stack than a web stack.
Inside Figma
Infrastructure
Engineering
Behind the scenes