IC career levels

Early Career
Focused on building your craft, deepening your knowledge of the product development process, and working on features with significant oversight from a more senior designer/writer or manager.

Experienced
Focused on building your craft, deepening your knowledge of the product development process, and working on features with significant oversight from a more senior designer/writer or manager via pairing sessions and 1:1s.

Emerging Leader
Still investing in craft and collaboration skills, and starting to be able to grow those skills in others on the team. Trusted to own design/writing for your team or feature area with little oversight. Your work has measurable affects you can point to, impacting your pillar and/or the larger design team.

Leader
A leader in design craft and product strategy, fully leading end-to-end design of features without oversight. You've shipped work that has clear product or business impact, which you are able to communicate clearly.

Seasoned Leader
A craftsperson of significant mastery; you guide, direct, and approve work of other designers/writers. Trusted to lead the largest and highest impact projects to the business, often with significant complexity. You're a leader at Figma and starting to represent design at Figma across the broader industry via conferences, community engagement, and beyond.

Industry Leader
A visionary craftsperson who defines and evolves the systems, patterns, and principles that guide how design happens at scale. You shape the direction of Figma's design practice and your perspective is sought after to shape the future of design.

Yourself
At this level, you shouldn't yet have to think too much about having team-wide impact, but instead focus on developing your own skills.

Your team
Now that you're starting to settle in, you can grow your focus to helping your broader working team.

Your team(s)
At this level it's more likely you're juggling multiple projects across the pillar, and beginning to influence work more broadly.

The design org
Here your scope starts to widen outside your core working team and projects and into the broader pillar.

The product org / company
At this level, your work and practices start to set the bar and influence not only other designers, but the wider product org and company.

The company / industry
Your work and practices define new standards not just for Figma, but influence the design community and industry at large.

You ask questions to understand who you're building for and why. You push for clarity and seek help if you don't get it.

You're starting to flag dependencies and edge cases in your projects.

You notice overlaps or dependencies between projects and escalate conversations to resolve them.

You build confidence in a direction with your eng/PM partners before acting.

You proactively address and resolve dependencies across team boundaries.

You drive your own team toward clarity on what you're building, why, and for whom.

You handle very complex and ambiguous projects, defining requirements and prioritizing the most impactful work streams even in the face of multiple competing demands.

You initiate high-impact projects and advocate for getting them on the roadmap.

You set the gold standard for problem definition; your ability to frame and scope projects are consistently clear, thoughtful, and compelling.

You coach other designers on prioritization, managing dependencies, and requirements definition.
You regularly inspire teams across Figma to up-level their product strategy with your insights

You are a trusted partner to executives, connecting product, design, and business strategy for critical company bets and investment decisions.

You unify how teams and pillars across the ecosystem consider and approach design solutions.

You're building your knowledge of the competitive landscape by spending time with other tools (e.g. conducting audits).

You have a basic understanding of when and how to validate your work through research.

You ask about success metrics.

Your industry knowledge and understanding of our users starts to deepen and guide your own work.

You partner with research to define the questions to ask and problems to explore.

You work with data science to interpret metrics and make informed decisions.

You can do research to validate your own work if necessary.

You use data to guide your work, and you help define the goals and success metrics for your projects.

Your comprehensive knowledge of industry design patterns deeply impacts your work.

You know when data and research are missing, and garner them where appropriate to inform your work and the work of others.

You're an expert in Figma's product space; someone others on the team learn from and seek to emulate. You surface new trends, patterns, and tools to the team regularly.

You partner with our leads in data and research to improve the design team's overall practices around them.

You leverage your knowledge of the industry to define new patterns and norms when needed.

You look outside of Figma and proactively connect with customers to identify trends and movements that should inform our future thinking.

You set the bar for evidence-informed design, pulling research and data into all strategic initiatives.

You collaborate with research and data leadership to evolve Figma's approach to insights.

You identify shifting behaviors and technologies early, helping the company position for the future.

You participate in vision activities, by generating ideas and brainstorming new concepts with your team.

You create sketches and mocks to communicate your ideas.

You assist PMs and more senior designers/writers in bringing larger strategic vision work to life (e.g. by creating mocks, designing decks, and writing documents).

You're responsible for exploring some parts of a vision exercise or sprint.

You participate in future product planning processes with your PM and eng partners.

You're starting to develop your own POV; you're trusted to own parts of larger strategic vision.

You proactively organize sprints or other processes to further define vision if it's otherwise lacking.

You set the vision for your area—solo or with another senior designer/writer—and it's inspiring and motivating to others.

You advocate for your POV at all levels of the organization (e.g. to executives) and can leverage data, storytelling, and visual design to bring stakeholders along.

You help drive the product planning process with your PM and eng partners.

You up-level other designers' and writers' vision work, and are entrusted to drive vision for the broadest, farthest-looking projects in the organization.

You help define what's next for Figma - as a product, a business, and a company.

You bridge today's roadmap with tomorrow's possibilities, helping executives align on what's next.

You rally teams to turn bold, inspiring futures into tangible workstreams that ship.

Your work sets trends that influence the design industry.

You reference industry patterns in your work and are building your knowledge of Figma's design system.

You explore multiple solutions for problems.

Your designs are consistent with existing patterns in the Figma design system and product.

You explore a wide breadth of design options and articulate trade-offs with each.

You are building your understanding on where our system can flex to accommodate certain needs.

Your work has few visual issues.

You start to form tenets, design principles and clear rationale as you design, and fall back on them to help make decisions.

Your work is thorough and detailed when it comes to interactions, states and edge cases (for example localization, breakpoints, mixed states, keyboard interactions etc.).

You work is thorough and complete with edge cases fully thought out—a model of accuracy and precision.

You partner with the design systems team to own and maintain the design system for your focus area.

Your work sets a high standard for visual design and serves as an example for other junior designers to follow.

You see gaps in how our visual system works and help up level it. When necessary, you define new patterns and changes to the underlying system.

Your peers look to you for your help and guidance on visual design, and you regularly offer feedback to improve work outside your own.

You're seen as a leader in visual design at Figma.

You set the standard for visual design craft and quality—not just at Figma, but across the industry

You identify where visual design can drive strategic differentiation, and craft systems for lasting impact.

You coach teams on aesthetics, coherence, and clarity at scale, ensuring quality across all products.

You start to prototype your ideas to bring work to life and illustrate flows more clearly.

You're eager to learn new tools and practices to improve the fidelity of your ideas.

You go beyond click-through prototypes and incorporate animations and transitions across various interactions.

You are familiar with common industry interaction patterns and reference them in your work.

You prototype fluently and quickly and you get helpful feedback from collaborators with them.

Your work is thorough and complete when it comes to all interaction details (like hover/focus and keyboard shortcuts).

You prototype with intentionality and know when to utilize prototypes to effectively communicate your ideas.

You are well-versed in common industry and Figma interaction patterns and their nuances across platforms.

Your prototypes help teams make business decisions.

Your interaction work raises the bar across the company.

Your peers look to you for guidance and feedback on improving their interaction work, and you proactively spot interaction issues and offer corrections.

You create frameworks and prototypes that inspire other people to do the same.

Your interaction design work is thorough and precise, solving for a range of edge cases. You thoughtfully communicate complex states such as selection, zoom, click/drag events, keyboard interactions and more.

You push the boundaries of interaction models and set gold standards at Figma and across the industry.

You prototype complex interactions to drive product direction and business decisions at Figma.

You advocate for interaction design quality across all product surfaces and relentlessly level up the org to sweat the details of polish and bugs.

You're able to work independently with a well-documented problem, and you ask for help when you get stuck.

You methodically investigate or audit part of a system, and summarize findings.

You consider edge cases when designing for complex systems.

You're starting to create and contribute to style guides of complex systems.

You re-purpose Figma's design patterns and offer recommendations to improve the system when something doesn't work.

Your designs are holistic and consider complex cases of existing systems.

You can recall internal properties/style guides of systems and explain them to stakeholders.

You are comfortable collaborating with engineering and PM to understand a system completely and improve it.

You aim to simplify and unify systems when appropriate to tame complexity—you can justify exceptions to the system and understand/explain their consequences.

You are comfortable making decisions without the system being documented.

You proactively bring up IA improvements opportunities across Figma.

You define, document and share how patterns can be utilized by others across our various products.

You create coherent systems that span across different products and surfaces.

Your work defines and documents new systems for other to use, while retaining systemic simplicity.

You see connections between systems (e.g. design systems and typography) and can lead projects to bring them together.

You uncover systemic IA interaction issues and advocate for specific improvements.

You're proactively guiding other people through complex systems, and helping them make decisions.

You architect foundational systems that unify Figma's products, design language, and workflows.

You consistently evolve our design system to scale across teams and product surfaces.

You guide others in how to design and maintain systems with clarity, longevity, and simplicity.

You can articulate key user needs for your features.

You clarify messaging goals when kicking off a project.

You use relevant messaging frameworks to shape copy.

You work with product marketing to craft clear, compelling value props, and write launch copy for your features.

You can always define what matters most in complex product moments.

You establish content principles for your product area, and use them to make better writing decisions.

You're able to navigate situations when user needs and business goals are in conflict.

You're able to work with/in design or engineering constraints and still deliver effective messaging.

You identify and drive content-led projects (ex: experiments around language, terminology overhauls).

You evolve the way Figma talks about itself and its products. You document your approach so writers and marketers can learn from you.

You lead content strategy initiatives that have a large, measurable impact on Figma's success.

You actively mentor junior writers on content strategy, helping them understand and connect with audiences in deeper ways.

You drive content-led opportunities that shift the business, product, and brand narrative

You define how Figma approaches and evaluates language for new product categories and audiences.

You share frameworks and insights that advance UX writing globally.

Your writing is concise and clear.

You understand Figma's voice in your product area and can shift your tone depending on the situation and audience.
Your final work is always free of typos and grammar issues.

You explore a range of options—from plain to playful—when drafting copy, and can articulate trade-offs of each.

You know when your copy still needs a few more passes, and you ask for feedback to get to the finish line.

You use vocabulary, variety, and cadence to make your writing more compelling and memorable, even in tight spaces.
You know when and why to break writing rules or take risks with bolder copy. You're able to explain the rationale for riskier copy to stakeholders.

You define Figma's voice in your product area and help writers outside your area document voice and tone as needed.
You're making measurable improvements to one of our content systems (ex: onboarding, notifications).

You evangelize the value of great writing in the design org and beyond.

You're building processes or guidelines to up-level writing across Figma.

In a pinch, you can write flawless, flowing copy without input from other writers.

Your peers rely on your wordsmithing guidance, and you work directly with writers and cross-functional partners to improve their writing abilities.

You're trusted to craft language for Figma's most critical, highest-impact product needs.

Your work and public thinking on language represent Figma as a global authority on product writing.

You audit Figma's features and borrow copy patterns and terminology to ensure consistency.

Your work adheres to Figma's UX writing style guide and the company-wide style guide.

You're familiar with industry copy patterns, accessibility guidelines, and localization best practices.

You flag Figma's content patterns that need improvement or make our products harder to use.

You contribute to the UX writing style guide.

You know when to follow or diverge from platform- and web-specific copy conventions.

You work with designers to fix content patterns in our design system that make Figma harder to use.

You know how to use different kinds of notifications (ex: email, in-product) in effective, user-friendly ways.

You're working with writers outside of design to shape Figma's writing standards.

You're making measurable improvements to one of our content systems (ex: onboarding, notifications).

You build consistency—and the processes to maintain it—across the features in your product area.

You reimagine large content systems in a way that dramatically improves usability or helps Figma address new opportunities or challenges.

When needed, you oversee the design and adoption of new components in our design system

You create frameworks for terminology, style, localization, and accessibility that span all of Figma.

You mentor cross-functional partners to ensure design and writing systems evolve together.

You drive the use of new technologies to create content systems at scale, influencing the industry.

You're actively learning about core Figma UI design features.

You use components from Figma's design system (ex: visual bells, confirmation modals, tooltips) to show copy options in context.

You're familiar with industry interaction patterns and give designers feedback on interaction and visual design.

You troubleshoot moments when poor information hierarchy hinders readability.

You flag situations when copy can't fix underlying design issues.

You make edits to complex designs and create basic prototypes.

You contribute design riffs to features.

You're comfortable building and rewiring prototypes in Figma.

You're skilled at interaction design problem-solving and can troubleshoot common UX issues.

You create designs from scratch using auto layout frames, and know how to apply styles and variables from a library.

Your interaction ideas consistently shape the final designs.

You're able to do more complex design tasks in Figma design (ex: building copy components, defining variables and styles).

You're expanding your UI design skills via classes or mentorship, and are comfortable doing interaction work that ships.

Your own design work is complete and well-crafted enough that you could serve as the designer for simpler features or flows.

You up level the writing team's UI design skills.

You blur the line between design and writing, setting the standard great UX writing in visual design.

You collaborate with design systems, research, and engineering to center language in user experience.

Your craft enables you to seamlessly fill in as a designer for more complex features or flows.

You communicate reliably—you're responsive, kind, and proactive in discussions.

You present your work with context about the design problem, known research or user needs, and why you made specific design decisions.

Your design files and presentations are well organized and easy to follow.

You participate regularly in team discussions and meetings.

You're growing your storytelling abilities; your presentations have a clear narrative, good context setting, and you're building your skills at leading meetings confidently and effectively.

Your written communication is clear; others are able to readily understand it.

You're refining your storytelling and presentation skills, confidently presenting your work in an engaging way.

You lead meetings effectively, and could represent Figma well externally.

You're growing skills at conflict resolution.

Your written communication is clear, concise, and compelling.

You're a strong storyteller and able to influence and persuade at any level of the organization (e.g. to executives).

You're able to communicate candidly and kindly, and build rapport with all kinds of work partners—even difficult stakeholders.

You coach other designers/writers on written, verbal, and interpersonal skills.

You're an exceptional storyteller, and able to up level other designers/writers in this area and the team as a whole.

Interpersonally, you deescalate conflict effectively and can smooth out thorny projects and push teams to alignment.

You are a world-class communicator and storyteller, inspiring audiences inside and outside Figma.

Your narratives shape executive decisions, and you coach senior leaders in persuasive storytelling.

You're invited to speak at conferences and represent Figma's vision for design and collaboration.

You share work regularly and ask for feedback on your working style and on the work itself.

You triage feedback on your work and ensure follow-ups.

You ask questions when you need more information to make a decision, or you're not sure about next steps.

You're actively learning how to work with your eng/PM partners, through 1:1s, milestones, and regular check-ins.

You have a clear process: it's easy for work partners to know your priorities and predict the cadence of your work.

You're starting to work more independently. You know how to manage bandwidth, and speak up if your plate is full.

You triage feedback diligently; nothing falls through the cracks.

Your process is adaptable and efficient. You generate and maintain momentum.

You handle feedback thoroughly and gracefully, and know when to change direction vs. staying the course.

You're becoming proficient at managing stakeholders and regularly work without close oversight.

You influence process at the team level, and delegate well.

You handle high volumes of feedback on your own work effectively.

You're a model for stakeholder management, effectively managing executive involvement when necessary.

You coach other designers/writers on their process and up level the team as a whole.

You coach other designers on stakeholder management, especially with executives.

You help create and influence our feedback culture at the company level.

You create frameworks to help drive cross-product coherence, balancing the requirements of many teams.

You drive Figma design's quality, velocity, and craft with scalable processes and best practices.

You identify systemic problems and drive cross-functional alignment toward clear outcomes.

You coach leaders and teams to strengthen feedback and critique culture.

You're eager to help with whatever needs doing on projects—no job is too small.

You maintain an open mindset toward changes and challenges, looking for how you can help and grow.

You proactively look for opportunities to contribute, and suggest ideas for improvements.

You pivot when necessary to changing needs, and feel comfortable running with ambiguity.

You lead with determination in the face of challenges, driving projects forward after contentious reviews, and translating feedback into actionable steps.

You're starting to become a model for growth and resiliency on the team.

You're consistently solutions-oriented, and are acutely aware of your impact as a leader on the team, even in private settings.

You encourage others to maintain a healthy open mindset.

You have a toolkit for managing change for other team members, and can help turn around significant morale issues on teams.

You bring poise and stability in the midst of highly complex problems or difficult team circumstances.

You provide proactive mentorship and thoughtful, actionable feedback to others on your team.

You model unshakable resilience, perspective, and reflection through ambiguity and change.

You model how to balance experimentation, innovation, and execution at every level of the org.

Your global perspective connects Figma's work to the evolution of design, AI, and technology.

You're building an understanding of the business and its goals. Your work aims to solve key user problems, and you're starting to connect your work to business goals.

You follow up post launch to assess your work's impact and effectiveness.

You file bugs when you spot quality issues.

You understand how your work contributes to the business and prioritize accordingly.

You address post launch issues and make suggestions to improve your impact.

You host bug bashes for your projects.

You help drive roadmapping and planning conversations and have a deep understanding of how your work connects to business goals.

You work with appropriate urgency, consistently pushing projects forward.

You support your team in enhancing the quality and reliability of its work through iterating on processes, frameworks, critiques, etc.

You push to make the highest impact possible with your work, and you can make a successful business case for it.

You start to take on projects that align with particular areas of skill you're looking to influence more deeply across the team.

You support your pillar in enhancing the quality and reliability of its work.

You help others understand the business.

You identify opportunities for design to create new value for the business and garner resources to act.

You frequently suggest and execute extra projects outside of core responsibilities.

You lead by example in setting the highest quality standards for your pillar, and inspire improvement across the product with your feedback, insights, and expertise.

You deliver outcomes—new products, paradigms, systems, or standards—that meaningfully shift Figma's trajectory.

You balance creative ambition, vision, and industry influence with driving measurable business impact.

You help others by giving actionable feedback, such as:
Suggestions and ideas for other designers during crits.
Design reviews for your eng partner as they're building things.

You routinely help other designers/writers on the team grow, through your feedback or through skill shares.

You offer suggestions on how our product and processes can improve and help implement solutions.

You're starting to up level other teammates skills through more formal coaching and mentorship (e.g. interns or more junior designers/writers). Others actively seek your feedback, and listen to your guidance.

You drive initiatives that improve our team's workflows and the lives of other designers.

You lead by example—never hesitating to get your hands dirty (e.g. riffing where helpful and guiding others toward action).

You've implemented and sometimes defined team processes like critiques and team meetings.

You are mentoring in bigger ways; like teaching new skills to teammates and sharing your learnings with the greater design team.

You're a leader at Figma, with impact on the business and culture across the organization.

You up level other designers' leadership skills, building more design leaders within the organization.

You are a multiplier of multipliers, mentoring senior leaders on organizational and industry influence

You shape Figma's design org identity, culture, and strategy, helping define excellence at scale.

You influence the global design community through writing, speaking, and mentorship.

You volunteer to help out with team programs, like hosting cooldowns and icebreakers, or helping out with off-sites.

You participate in company culture activities, like ERGs, Maker Week, or Show & Tell.

You attend important company events like FigNation and Tech Talks in order to stay up to date.

You suggest and implement team culture improvements.

You participate in some hiring activities when needed, like interviewing candidates and sourcing jams.

You're an owner of our team culture, suggesting new rituals and activities to bring us together as a team.

You actively participate in hiring, whether through interviewing, sourcing, or suggesting improvements to our processes.

You represent design as a leader to the rest of the organization, by giving feedback on process and culture or taking a leadership role in FigNation, Config, or other events.

You represent Figma externally whether through conferences, blog posts, or other channels.

You help attract top talent to the organization. People join Figma because they're excited to learn from you, and work with you.

You're a global ambassador for Figma, attracting top talent and partnerships.

You create programs and platforms that elevate underrepresented voices in design.

You embody and evolve Figma's cultural values, ensuring design leadership remains inclusive, curious, and kind.