Director, Research - AI Evals

Role Description

Figma is growing our team of passionate creatives and builders on a mission to make design accessible to all. 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.

The ideal candidate brings deep, hands-on experience evaluating AI/LLM-powered products — blending human evaluation with automated, model-based approaches — along with the product instinct and communication skills to make evaluation genuinely useful.

What you'll do at Figma:

• 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.

Qualifications

• 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.

Requirements

• While it's not required, it's an added plus if you also have:
• 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.

Benefits

• Figma offers equity to employees, as well as a competitive package of additional benefits, including:
• Health, dental & vision.
• Retirement with company contribution.
• Parental leave & reproductive or family planning support.
• Mental health & wellness benefits.
• Generous PTO.
• Company recharge days.
• A learning & development stipend.
• A work from home stipend.
• Cell phone reimbursement.
• Sales incentive pay for most sales roles and an annual bonus plan for eligible non-sales roles.