Director, Research - AI Evals

Figma is seeking a Director of Research - AI Evals to lead the evaluation of AI-powered experiences, ensuring quality and effectiveness in product development. 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.

• •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.

• •Equity to employees.
• •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, and cell phone reimbursement.
• •Sales incentive pay for most sales roles and an annual bonus plan for eligible non-sales roles.
• •Annual Base Salary Range: $258,000 — $348,000 USD.

• •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.