Here's our guide on how to land the Figma software engineer interview.

Figma is one of the fastest growing startups in the design space, and has radically changed how engineers and designers work with designs.

Read on to understand the types of questions asked and the different interview stages at Figma to put your best foot forward in the interview.

Interview Process

Interview Stages

Typically, there are four stages to product engineer interviews at Airtable: recruiter screen, coding assignment, on-site, and reference check.

Recruiter Screen

The recruiter phone screen at Figma is designed to screen out candidates for culture fit.

To prepare for the Figma recruiter screen, be sure to review your resume to speak from it, and be sure to research a bit more about Figma, like their company mission.

Since Figma uses this interview to screen candidates for culture fit, it's critical to consider Figma's three values of 1) Have Fun, 2) Be Bold, and 3) Foster Inclusivity and how they apply to your own experiences in the past.

The number one question to prepare here is: why would you want to work at Figma? Be honest and express your passion for working at the company.

Technical Screen

The technical screen interview is a practical coding question asked virtually, which will be generally a bit lighter in depth than the on-site interview questions.

On-site

The onsite Figma software engineer interview consists of five rounds:

Non-technical Culture Interview
Non-technical Deep-Dive Interview
System Design Interview
Coding Interview #1
Coding Interview #2

The next section will discuss specifics on how to prepare for each of these rounds, but we generally recommend using Figma significantly before the interview so you're familiar with details and specific questions you may be asked that will be pertinent to the company.

You'll have the option to split your on-site interview into two days if that works better for your schedule.

After the on-site interview, you'll have the opportunity to ask the Figma team more questions to ensure there's a good fit before the offer stage.

Sample Interview Questions

Figma's interviews break down into a culture interview, a deep-dive interview, a system design interview, and two coding interviews.

Culture Interview

Figma strongly emphasizes culture in their software engineer interviews, which is why it's critical to review and reflect on Figma's values before your interview. Consider how your own experiences and specific examples tie into the values that Figma upholds.

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Deep-dive Interview

This deep-dive interview is one of the most heavily weighted in the evaluation process and will be conducted by your future manager. In this interview, you'll do a deep-dive on your past experience and discuss both technical and non-technical details of a previous engineering problem that you've solved.

This again is a great opportunity to demonstrate your alignment with Figma's values, and the technical complexity of a project that you've worked on before.

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System Design Interview

Figma's software engineer design interview questions can seem daunting, since they involve taking real-world problems and breaking them down into small components.

The best way to prepare for system design interviews is to watch our practice system design interviews like this one on Facebook's news feed, and try your hand at some practice system design questions in our interview question database.

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Coding Interview

Be sure to review concepts like hash tables and linked lists before your interview.

One way to shine in these interviews is to always mention and consider edge cases. Is there a particularly tough "worst-case" scenario for one of the data structure's implementations? How might a certain data structure outperform another if we expect the input data to already be sorted? Considering questions like these and "zooming out" to think about the broader implications of certain data structure selections will elevate your interview answer.

To prepare for these interviews, we recommend reviewing our data structures and algorithms modules in our software engineering course and practicing data structures questions in our interview question database.

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