Joel Lithgow

Dear Hiring Manager,

I am writing to express my interest in the Software Engineer, Distributed Systems position at Figma. I want to be upfront: my background is primarily in frontend development, not backend infrastructure. But Figma's 'Grow as you go' philosophy resonates with me, and I'm drawn to this role precisely because it represents the direction I want to grow.

As a daily Figma user, I'm constantly impressed by how smooth the real-time collaboration feels—multiple cursors moving simultaneously, changes syncing instantly, the application working seamlessly across platforms. I find myself curious about how this works at the infrastructure level. What makes Figma feel so responsive? How do you handle consistency across millions of concurrent users? These are the questions I want to learn to answer by building the systems myself.

My current experience: seven years at California College of the Arts, progressing from QA Specialist to Interaction Designer to UX Designer/Developer. I work primarily in TypeScript, have experience with Docker and GCP Cloud Run for deployment, and have built CI/CD pipelines. I understand systems thinking from my QA background—debugging complex issues, tracing problems across layers, maintaining reliability. But I haven't worked on distributed systems at Figma's scale.

What I bring: a strong foundation in how applications behave from the user's perspective, a systematic approach to understanding complex systems, and genuine curiosity about infrastructure. I learn quickly—my progression from QA to design to development happened because I'm willing to go deep on new domains. I'm not afraid of gritty, high-impact challenges; I find them motivating.

What I'd need to learn: sharding, replication, consistency models, and the specific technologies in your stack (Go, Kafka, service mesh). I'm honest about this gap. But I believe my systematic thinking, debugging instincts, and drive to understand how things work at a fundamental level would serve me well in ramping up.

I'm based in Oakland and would work from the San Francisco hub or remotely. Even if this specific role isn't the right fit, I wanted to express my interest in infrastructure work at Figma—whether that's this team or a path that starts elsewhere and grows in this direction.

Thank you for considering my application. I understand this is a stretch from my current experience, but I'm genuinely excited about the opportunity to learn distributed systems at a company whose product I love and whose values align with how I approach my career.