just finished my figma frontend engineer interview loop and got an offer (accepting). wanted to write up the real picture since the older threads are pretty thin on specifics.
background: 4 YOE, React-heavy, worked on a design system at my last company. applied for a senior-adjacent frontend role, not the staff track.
the process: Recruiter screen (30 min) -> technical phone screen (60 min) -> virtual onsite (4 rounds, one day)
phone screen: live coding in a shared editor. one algorithmic problem, medium difficulty. think graph traversal or something similar. they want you to talk through your approach before coding. i fumbled the first explanation and my interviewer said 'back up, what's the simpler version of this problem?' which i appreciated. not a gotcha vibe.
onsite round 1 - UI implementation: this was the most figma-specific round. they asked me to build a small interactive component from scratch. no framework, vanilla JS and DOM APIs. the exact prompt: implement a minimal version of a tooltip that positions itself relative to its anchor and adjusts if it would overflow the viewport. i got through the core logic but ran out of time on edge cases. still passed. completeness matters less than approach.
onsite round 2 - algorithms: standard LC-style. one medium, one easy. if you do the problem in 10 minutes they often follow up with 'what if the constraints change to X'. this happened to me and the follow-up tripped me up a little.
onsite round 3 - system design: i was asked to design a real-time collaborative whiteboard, which is basically designing a simplified figma. they want you to think about operational transforms or CRDTs at a high level, sync strategies, client state. you don't need to know OT deeply but you should know the concept exists and why eventual consistency is hard. i sketched a simple websocket-based approach and we dug into the edge cases.
onsite round 4 - behavioral / values: 45 minutes, dedicated. questions around cross-functional collaboration, how i handle disagreements with designers, a time i pushed back on scope. figma is genuinely design-engineer culture so they probe whether you can collaborate with design without being territorial.
comp: offer came in at $195k base, $180k RSU over 4 years (standard cliff), senior IC level. SF-based but i'm remote. leveling felt fair for my experience.
happy to answer follow-up questions.