Director, Research - AI Evals

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 Figma Research team is hiring a Director, Research - AI Evals to own how we measure the quality of Figma's AI-powered experiences. As Figma ships more AI capabilities across our products, the question 'is this really good?' has never mattered more — and answering it rigorously is what this role exists to do. You'll define what 'good' means for our AI features, build the frameworks and quality bars to measure it, and turn that into trusted signal that product teams rely on to decide what to ship.

• Own AI evaluation methods and operations for Figma's AI-powered experiences — define quality dimensions, design how we measure them, and turn results into decision-ready signal.
• Build and maintain evaluation frameworks, rubrics, golden datasets, and quality bars, combining human evaluation with automated/model-based approaches (e.g., LLM-as-judge) where appropriate.
• Partner with engineering to stand up repeatable, reproducible evaluation pipelines and regression testing, so evaluation is a routine part of how AI features are built and shipped.
• Produce clear readouts and dashboards that let stakeholders confidently make go/no-go and prioritization decisions.
• Socialize a shared definition of quality so evaluation standards are adopted across teams rather than re-invented — and advocate for evaluation as a strategic partner in the product process.
• Manage a small team to execute our AI evals in partnership with contractors, internal staff, and/or LLMs.

• 10+ years of experience in product, research, applied research, or a closely related field, including 2+ years of management experience.
• Direct, hands-on experience owning the evaluation of AI/LLM-powered products.
• Expertise designing and running AI evaluation — human evaluation programs, rubric and benchmark/golden-dataset construction, inter-rater reliability — and sound judgment about when and how to apply automated/model-based approaches (e.g., LLM-as-judge), including their limitations.
• Strength across both qualitative and quantitative methods, comfort with data and metrics, and the ability to reason about model behavior.
• Demonstrated success in identifying the riskiest assumptions behind an ambiguous quality question, prioritizing them, and designing right-sized evaluation to build confidence.
• A proven track record of gaining buy-in from executive and cross-disciplinary stakeholders — transcending methodology to articulate a larger user story and the 'so what' to inspire action.

• Experience building or co-building automated evaluation pipelines and regression testing in partnership with engineering, or familiarity with eval tooling (e.g., Braintrust, LangSmith, DeepEval, or equivalents).
• Experience standing up a new function, practice, or discipline from scratch.
• 2+ years in product design, user-centric product management, data science, product development, and/or front-end engineering.
• A familiarity and depth of experience using Figma's products.

Annual Base Salary Range: $258,000—$348,000 USD. Figma offers equity to employees, as well as a competitive package of additional benefits, including health, dental, and vision coverage; retirement benefits with company contributions; parental leave and reproductive or family planning support; mental health and wellness benefits; and paid time off. Figma provides paid sick leave, holidays, and other leave benefits in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Exempt employees are eligible for employer-provided paid flexible PTO in addition to flexible paid sick leave. Additional benefits may include company recharge days, cell phone and home internet reimbursements, and a number of lifestyle spending accounts.