Career & Education: New Figmates on Getting Started

As part of our ongoing look inside Figma’s teams, we spoke with four interns and new graduates about their first experiences at the company. They shared practical advice for applicants, what surprised them about the work, and how they’ve grown since joining.

Why They Chose Figma

The group cited a few common reasons for applying: the product itself, the company’s collaborative culture, and the opportunity to work on tools they already used daily. One intern noted that Figma’s focus on design and engineering collaboration was a draw, since it meant learning from a range of disciplines early on. Another mentioned that the remote-friendly structure made the transition from school to work less daunting.

What the Day-to-Day Was Like

Rather than being relegated to small tasks, the interns described being placed directly onto active product teams. Their responsibilities included everything from writing production code to participating in design critiques and shipping features. A recurring theme was the emphasis on asking questions: they found that teammates expected them to be curious and to push back when they didn’t understand something.

Advice for Future Applicants

  • Show your process, not just the final product. In portfolio reviews, the group noted that interviewers wanted to see how candidates approached problems, including dead ends and revisions.
  • Practice talking through code and designs aloud. Because collaboration is central at Figma, being able to communicate your reasoning matters as much as technical skill.
  • Don’t over-polish your work. One new grad explained that rough but thoughtful experiments were often more impressive than a perfectly finished sample that lacked depth.
  • Use your network, but use it well. Reaching out for informational conversations was encouraged, but the group stressed coming prepared with specific questions about the role and team.

Lessons From the First Few Months

Several interviewees highlighted the shift from academic projects, where scope is fixed, to work where you define impact. “In school, the assignment is the problem,” one said. “At work, the problem is the assignment.” They also pointed to the value of learning how to give and receive direct feedback, which takes practice but ultimately accelerates growth.

Another common reflection concerned pace: rather than rushing to prove themselves, they learned that sustainable output mattered more. They advised new hires to be explicit about what they needed, whether that meant more context on a project or more time to ramp up.

Looking Ahead

When asked what they hoped to take forward, the group mentioned building a habit of continuous learning and maintaining the same level of curiosity they brought in on day one. They also emphasized mentorship: each recommended finding a peer or manager who could offer honest, regular check-ins rather than waiting for formal reviews.

For current students, their closing counsel was simple: start building and sharing work early, even if it’s imperfect, because the confidence to share comes from practice.

Finding the right fit: advice from Figma’s early-career talent

Choosing a first job—or deciding between another semester and a full-time offer—is rarely a clean process. For the 2021 interns and new grads at Figma, the decision came down to a mix of practical research, honest self-assessment, and a few well-placed conversations.

Four Figmates across different teams and stages shared how they approached the search, what they weighed, and what they learned after landing at Figma.

What mattered most in a first role

Career growth and ownership came up repeatedly, but each person prioritized those goals differently.

For Langston Dziko, now on the engineering side, growth meant understanding how the company supports its engineers. "I wanted a good idea of how companies focused on helping engineers progress," he said. Beyond that, he looked for signs of long-term opportunity: asking engineers whether they could see themselves staying at the company, which he says hints at whether career stagnation is likely.

Emily Jia, who joined the data team, was more focused on role type and company stage. "I have a fairly technical background but I was interested in a fast-paced and product-focused role, so I focused on early-stage data teams at rapidly growing startups." She also weighed culture, emphasizing the importance of empathy and communication practices in her colleagues.

Daniela Velez, on the education and community side, searched for something harder to quantify. "I was searching for authenticity in culture and in people," she said, adding that Figma's focus on making design more accessible drew her in.

How they prepared and what they recommend

The preparation strategies varied by role but shared a common thread: deliberate practice and leveraging other people's experience.

For interviewing engineers, Dziko recommends repetitive drilling—10 to 20 practice runs with a group of friends, alternating between asking and answering. That builds confidence as much as skill. For behavioral rounds, he suggests reading the company's engineering blog to internalize its stated values, not just its tech stack.

Velez, who went through a technical process, leaned on more traditional resources: Cracking the Coding Interview for concept refreshers, LeetCode for problem practice, and Interviews.school for an overview of common topics. Her key preparation tip was to focus energy on areas of weakness, like dynamic programming and recursion.

Jago Pang, who came on as a designer, had a different interview format to prepare for. Since his process included a portfolio presentation, he built a dedicated deck and rehearsed it repeatedly with friends and family. To shape it well, he tapped into community resources: workshops with Design Buddies, portfolio examples on Cofolios, and mentor feedback from platform like ADPlist. He stressed getting comfortable asking for input early. "As designers, we tend to only show our best work, but ask early for visual craft questions, ideas and run throughs," he said. That comfort, he notes, becomes essential in team design critiques.

The decision to join Figma

Figma did not top everyone's list immediately. Jia first came across a blog post by a new grad engineer on the design systems team. "I really appreciated his perspective, and thought it was telling that Figma gave him a platform to share it." During interviews, she noted the data team was hiring its first new grads, actively building out its culture.

Pang credited the product itself for his interest. "Figma kickstarted my career in design and helped me learn what great design means," he said.

What changed after joining

Early projects have run the gamut from infrastructure to user flows.

Jia began with a six-month rotation across product teams, eventually landing on the Feedback team. There, she helped run an experiment showing FigJam templates more prominently in the file browser to increase clarity for users.

Dziko's first project was large-scale engineering work with high stakes for the product's future: a year-long effort to migrate data to a horizontally sharded model. He noted the significance of joining such a critical project as a new grad.

On the education front, Velez worked on account creation and sign-up improvements using new styled components, making onboarding smoother at scale.

For Pang, it was about discovering and expanding scope. He initially came in to make publishing to the Figma Community easier, but asking questions up front allowed him to broaden the project's impact. "The whole experience has taught me a lot about taking ownership and running with it," he said.

Growth as a process

Over time, the learning extends beyond the work itself. Pang noted that a nudge from his mentor during a mid-point review changed his approach entirely. He was encouraged to share work more openly, ask for help in Slack channels, and post regular updates on his feature—shifts that made him "part of more conversations" and more proactive overall.

Velez highlighted reflection habits that have stuck with her, including regular team check-ins that touch on personal growth alongside project health. Her advice to those at the start of their search is to build breadth across languages and frameworks rather than diving deep too early, and to treat even non-technical projects as opportunities for collaboration and conflict navigation.

On the emotional side of the job hunt, Dziko recommends writing down what you actually want, so you know which questions to ask interviewers. Jia's counsel was perhaps the most direct: respect the process but keep perspective. "Your worth is not defined by any one job," she noted, adding that the right fit may take more than a single role to find.

Real work, real pressure

Interns and new grads at Figma aren’t parked on side projects. They ship features that reach millions of users, and that expectation shapes how they work. One intern described the shift from school to production code as a matter of stakes: in class, code either runs or it doesn’t; in Figma’s codebase, a change goes through design review, code review, and testing against real multi-player scenarios before it ever touches production.

That pressure is deliberate. The team assigns interns to areas with active user traffic, knowing that the feedback loop — seeing your own name in a changelog, or watching a bug report roll in for something you wrote — teaches faster than any contrived exercise. One new grad noted that the hardest adjustment wasn’t the tools or the scale, but learning to ask for help early instead of grinding alone.

Mentorship without hand-holding

Every intern pairs with a dedicated mentor, but the relationship is less about daily instruction and more about unblocking. Mentors set context, explain why a system is built the way it is, and then get out of the way. The result is that interns learn Figma’s architecture by changing it: touching file syncing logic, collaborating on the plugin API, or debugging performance issues in the rendering engine.

Weekly check-ins make room for career conversations, but technical growth comes from code review. Figma treats review comments as teaching moments, not verdicts. Interns described senior engineers who would explain the tradeoff behind a requested change rather than just marking a diff “needs work.”

One piece of advice repeated across the interviews: write the design doc before the code. At Figma, even small features benefit from a written plan, because the doc forces decisions about API shape, edge cases, and rollout before implementation cost is sunk.

Support systems beyond your desk

Figma’s intern program runs on structure — a rotating series of onboarding sessions, engineering talks, and social events — but the support that mattered most was peer-based. Interns formed study groups to read unfamiliar codebases together, and new grads relied on “buddy” systems that matched them with someone outside their direct team. That second layer catches the questions you’re too embarrassed to ask your mentor, like how to request time off or which internal tool posts code review requests.

From internship to full-time

Return offers are common, but not automatic. Interns said the conversion process starts early: midpoint reviews measure progress against goals set in week one, and the final presentation to the broader engineering org doubles as a de facto portfolio. One new grad’s advice was to keep a running log of wins — not for bragging, but because the review process goes smoother when you can cite specific commits and user-facing improvements.

What to do before day one

Across interviews, current interns had three concrete suggestions for future applicants:

  • Use Figma daily for a personal project. Building a plugin or a component library reveals how the tool behaves from the outside, which makes the internal architecture far easier to navigate.
  • Practice reading unfamiliar code. Tracing a function call from UI through to database layer is a skill, not a talent. Pick an open-source project and follow one feature end to end.
  • Ask questions in the interview about team culture. Specifically, ask who reviews your code and what that process looks like. The answer tells you more about the job than any job description.

The program isn’t trying to be easy. But by the end of the summer, every intern could point to a merged feature — and to the specific moment they realized they could operate independently in a production codebase. That arc, from nervous onboarding to shipped work, is the point.