PhD Intern, Software Engineer

About the Role

Figma is growing its Rendering & Animation team, which builds the graphics engine that renders the canvas for all Figma applications. The team's mission is to make rendering performant, feature-rich, reliable, maintainable, and extendible across all products and surfaces. This role offers the opportunity to take ownership of a high-impact project at the intersection of technical strengths and graphics, rendering, or media challenges. The internship is 12 or 16 weeks and can be held from US hubs (San Francisco or New York) starting May or June 2027.

Key Responsibilities

• Learn from industry graphics engineers and participate as an embedded team member of the Rendering & Animation team.
• Collaborate with engineers, PMs, designers, and researchers to scope and execute work.
• Develop, validate, and document solutions from prototypes to production-ready systems.
• Drive projects that apply research insights to meaningful product challenges.
• Contribute to domain areas such as:
• Crafting and optimizing shaders for sophisticated effects.
• Investigating improvements to anti-aliasing algorithms.
• Improving media processing capabilities.
• Animating spline interpolation.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Current enrollment as a 4th or 5th-year senior PhD student pursuing a PhD in Computer Graphics, Media Processing, or a related field.
• Experience working with OpenGL, WebGL, WebGPU, Vulkan, or Metal and their respective shader languages (GLSL, WGSL) or other low-level graphics APIs.
• Proficiency in either C++ or Rust.
• A track record of rigorous problem-solving through academic or applied research, with experience thinking holistically about use cases and the low-level technology required.

Qualifications (Added Plus)

• Demonstrated expertise in computer graphics, supported by publications at conferences such as SIGGRAPH, Eurographics, High Performance Graphics, NVIDIA GTC, or Pacific Graphics.
• Proficiency in WebAssembly, web graphics, 2D graphics, performance optimization, animation, geometry, or media.
• Interest in art and design applications.
• Experience using AI tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude) to write, debug, and optimize code.
• Related industry experience via a past internship or full-time role.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills, with demonstrated experience collaborating across functions.