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PhD Intern, Software Engineer
Figma
About the Role
Figma is growing its team of passionate creatives and builders on a mission to make design accessible to all. Figma’s platform helps teams bring ideas to life—whether you're brainstorming, creating a prototype, translating designs into code, or iterating with AI. From idea to product, Figma empowers teams to streamline workflows, move faster, and work together in real time from anywhere in the world. The Rendering & Animation team (R&A) builds the graphics engine which renders the canvas for all Figma applications, making rendering performant, feature-rich, reliable, maintainable and extendible across all products & surfaces. This role is a 12 or 16-week internship starting in May or June of 2027, based in San Francisco or New York.
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 your work.
- Develop, validate, and document solutions from prototypes to production-ready systems.
- Drive projects that apply research insights to meaningful product challenges.
- Contribute to exciting domain areas, including:
- 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.