10 Figma Software Engineer (New Grad) Interview Questions (2026)

Outline

Use Figma before the interview. Be ready to share a screen and walk through a real file you made (a small design, a component library, an interactive prototype). Pick specific features you appreciate (auto-layout, variants, multiplayer cursors, dev mode). Generic praise lands flat. Figma is a craft-and-product-taste company.

Outline

STAR. Pick a story where you sweated a specific detail — easing curve for a transition, hit-target sizing, color contrast, microcopy. Concrete: the actual decision and what was wrong before. Figma engineers work closely with designers — they want engineers who care about the visible product, not just the architecture.

Outline

STAR. Concrete project, specific person, specific friction or alignment moment. Show empathy for the non-engineer perspective — design tradeoffs are real, not just 'they wanted it pretty.' End with what you learned about working across functions. Figma's whole pitch is design-engineer collaboration.

Outline

Recursive: for each element, if array recurse else push. Iterative: use a stack, pop, push back reversed if array. O(n) where n is total elements. Discuss the depth parameter (flatten(arr, depth=1) for partial flatten). Watch for the cycle case if asked (Set of seen references).

Outline

Recursive: if current is null or matches either target, return current. Recurse left and right. If both non-null, current is the LCA. Otherwise return the non-null side. O(n) time, O(h) recursion space. Walk through with a small tree. Variant: BST version is simpler (use the BST property).

Outline

Hash map of value to index, single pass. O(n) time, O(n) space. Common warmup. Be ready for follow-up variants: three-sum, sum closest to target, count of pairs. Walk through the loop with a small example so the interviewer sees you can verify correctness as you go.

Outline

Compute the overlap on x and y axes independently. xOverlap = max(0, min(r1.right, r2.right) - max(r1.left, r2.left)). Same for y. Area = xOverlap * yOverlap. Discuss inclusive vs exclusive coordinates, and the touch-but-not-overlap edge case. O(1). Figma asks this because rectangle overlap is core to selection and layout.

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Listen to pointerdown to start, pointermove to update transform, pointerup to end. Track offset between pointer and element origin so drag does not jump. Use translate3d for smooth motion. Discuss touch events, pointer capture, and boundary constraints. Figma frontend candidates get this or similar interactive prompts.

Outline

For each layer (in z-order), check if the point is inside its bounding box. Return the highest-z layer that hits. Naive: O(n) per query. Discuss spatial indexing (quadtree, R-tree) for many queries against the same layer set. Figma rendering is layer-heavy — this is a real internal problem.

Outline

Reproduce: throttle CPU in dev tools, simulate network. Then profile: paint, composite, JS execution. Common culprits: unnecessary re-renders, large layouts, layer explosion, sync layout reads in a loop, expensive observers. Mention will-change, transform vs top/left, requestAnimationFrame. Figma asks because rendering perf IS their product.