PhD Intern, Software Engineer - Graphics (2026)
at Figma
CA • New York, San Francisco, New York, United States
Figma is growing our 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. If you're excited to shape the future of design and collaboration, join us!
The Rendering & Animation team (R&A) builds the graphics' engine which renders the canvas for all Figma applications. Our mission is to make rendering performant, feature-rich, reliable, maintainable and extendible across all products & surfaces. The team plays a core, bedrock role for the company because it underpins the technology driving the user experience, touching many other teams, and as such is one of the most impactful areas of Figma.
The R&A team is devoted to hiring individuals with graphics expertise. We are interested in a variety of sub-domains, including 2D GPU-driven rendering, computational geometry & vector graphics, animation frameworks, anti-aliasing algorithms, shader effects, and more recently branching into video/image processing. A PhD Intern specializing in any of these areas would be a phenomenal fit for the team with a lot of exciting projects available. The team is geographically distributed around the US (New York, Boston, Alabama, Michigan, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles) with the most in-person collaboration happening in New York.
As an intern on our team, you’ll take ownership of a high-impact project at the intersection of your technical strengths and our most pressing graphics, rendering, or media challenges. You’ll work closely with your intern manager, team leads, and collaborators across 1–2 partner teams to deliver tangible results within your internship. This is an opportunity to do significant, portfolio-worthy work that directly supplies Figma’s visual platform.
This position is eligible for Winter or Summer of 2026 in either
What you'll do at Figma:
- Learn from industry graphics engineers
- Collaborate with your intern manager and team members to finalize the project goals and clarify the project requirements, design, architecture and achievements
- Participate as a member of the Rendering & Animation team writing code, tests and documentation, fixing bugs, attending the weekly team meeting and communicating progress updates
- Contribute to exciting domain areas; some examples: crafting and optimizing shaders for sophisticated effects, investigating improvements to anti-aliasing algorithms, evolving physics-based motion frameworks, improving media processing capabilities, animating spline interpolation, and more!
We’d love to hear from you if you have:
- Ph.D in Computer Graphics or Media Processing in their 4-5th year
- Experience working with OpenGL, WebGL, WebGPU, and their respective shader languages (GLSL, WGSL) or other low-level graphics APIs like Vulkan & Metal
- Experience in C++
- Self-motivated initiative to deliver value and think holistically about the use-case as well as the low-level technology
While it’s not required, it’s an added plus if you also have:
- Experience in WebAssembly and web graphics environments
- Experience in 2D graphics
- Experience in performance optimization
- Experience or curiosity about art & design applications
At Figma, one of our values is Grow as you go. We believe in hiring smart, curious people who are excited to learn and develop their skills. If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with the points outlined in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.
Pay Transparency Disclosure
This internship role is based in either Figma’s San Francisco or New York hub offices, and has the hourly base pay rate stated below. Figma also offers interns a housing stipend and travel reimbursement. Figma’s compensation and benefits are subject to change and may be modified in the future.
At Figma we celebrate and support our differences. We know employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, our product and our community to flourish. Figma is an equal opportunity workplace - we are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity/expression, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.
We will work to ensure individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to apply for a role, participate in the interview process, perform essential job functions, and receive other benefits and privileges of employment. If you require accommodation, please reach out to accommodations-ext@figma.com. These modifications enable an individual with a disability to have an equal opportunity not only to get a job, but successfully perform their job tasks to the same extent as people without disabilities.
Examples of accommodations include but are not limited to:
- Holding interviews in an accessible location
- Enabling closed captioning on video conferencing
- Ensuring all written communication be compatible with screen readers
- Changing the mode or format of interviews
To ensure the integrity of our hiring process and facilitate a more personal connection, we require all candidates keep their cameras on during video interviews. Additionally, if hired you will be required to attend in person onboarding.
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