Language
C++figma.com
Powers the design canvas and rendering engine.
Why: Game engines use it for its efficiency and flexible memory management, which a real-time canvas needs.
TypeScriptfigma.com
Is the language of the front end and, since 2024, of the prototype viewer once written in Skew.
Why: Their in-house Skew language was hard for new hires and lacked an outside ecosystem.
UI library
Hosting
Database
PostgreSQLfigma.com
Stores product data on Amazon RDS, split vertically and sharded horizontally.
Why: Moving to another database meant a risky migration and losing their Postgres expertise with only months of runway.
Build and runtime
ORM
ActiveRecordfigma.com
Maps the Ruby monolith's models to the database.
Data fetching
Temporalfigma.com
Runs workflows on Kubernetes, deployed from its Helm chart.
Backend framework
Rustfigma.com
Runs the performance-sensitive core of the multiplayer server, one process per document.
Why: The old TypeScript server had unpredictable latency spikes and garbage collector pauses, and Rust offered low resource use with safety.
Node.jsfigma.com
Handles the network side of the multiplayer server.
Sinatrafigma.com
Serves Figma's HTTP backend inside a Ruby monolith.
Powers DBProxy, the service that routes queries to the right Postgres shard.
Error monitoring
Datadogfigma.com
Collects observability data from the platform.
Figma says its stack looks more like a game engine than a web app. The canvas is written in C++, a language game engines use for its efficiency and control over memory, and compiled to WebAssembly. Moving to WebAssembly in 2017 cut load times by more than 3x.
C++ lacks good libraries for responsive interfaces, so everything around the canvas is built in React and TypeScript.
The multiplayer server that syncs every edit was first written in TypeScript on Node.js. As Figma grew, its single-threaded design meant one slow operation could block everyone on a worker, and garbage collection caused unpredictable latency spikes.
In 2018 the team rewrote the performance-sensitive part in Rust, running as a child process per document, while network handling stayed in Node.js. Rust gave low resource usage and safety without C++'s rough ergonomics.
Sources:figma.com
In 2020 Figma ran a single Postgres database on AWS's largest instance. By late 2022 it had split into about a dozen vertically partitioned databases on Amazon RDS, but some tables had reached terabytes and billions of rows, so in 2023 the team shipped horizontal sharding behind a new Go service called DBProxy.
They considered CockroachDB, TiDB, Spanner and Vitess, plus NoSQL. Switching would have meant a risky data migration and losing years of Postgres expertise with only months of runway left, and NoSQL lacked the relational flexibility they relied on.
Sources:figma.com
Figma's services already ran in containers on AWS ECS, but ECS was adding complexity: no StatefulSets for etcd, no easy way to run Helm charts like Temporal, and slow load balancer changes during emergencies. In 2023 the team moved to EKS, and by January 2024 the monolith and the multiplayer services were running on three active clusters.
They kept the developer interface the same: services are defined in one Bazel config and CI generates the Kubernetes YAML. Node autoscaling with Karpenter brought costs down.
Sources:figma.com
Figma's prototype viewer and mobile playback engine were written in Skew, a compile-to-JavaScript language built in-house. It was hard for new hires to learn and didn't integrate with the rest of the code.
Once mobile browsers supported WebAssembly and hot paths could move to the C++ engine, Figma wrote a Skew-to-TypeScript transpiler and migrated in three phases without pausing feature work. TypeScript became the source of truth in 2024.
Sources:figma.com
Found on the homepage with the open Wappalyzer rules (HTML, scripts and headers). It shows what runs in the browser, not the whole backend.
Checked on 2026-10-29. Every tool links to the public source that shows it.
