Figma Engineering

Overview

Figma is a browser-native design tool whose entire value proposition depends on tens of designers seeing each other's cursors and edits in the same document, and the engineering team has had to invent the scaling story for that as it grew. The blog goes deepest on three problems: horizontally sharding Postgres without losing the relational guarantees the app depends on, the LiveGraph subscription system that fans out collaborative document changes to every connected client in real time, and autosave plus conflict resolution in a CRDT-flavored editing model. For interviews, 'How Figma horizontally scaled Postgres' and 'How Figma reduced instability by scaling to multiple databases' are the model answer for sharding a relational primary, and 'Figma's LiveGraph: a real-time data system at scale' anchors any collaborative-editing system design.

Interview questions

• What can I learn from Figma's engineering blog?
• Which Figma posts are most useful for collaboration system design interviews?
• Why is Figma's blog valuable for Postgres-sharding discussions?

More Engineering Blogs topics

• Canva Engineering
• Coinbase Engineering
• Discord Engineering
• DoorDash Engineering
• Dropbox Engineering
• eBay Engineering
• Flipkart Engineering
• GitHub Engineering
• Google Research
• Instacart Engineering
• Instagram Engineering
• LinkedIn Engineering