PhD Intern, AI Applied Scientist (2027)

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. If you're excited to shape the future of design and collaboration, join us! The AI Research team at Figma is working on the cutting edge of AI and Design. We work on optimizing agentic systems for design quality and end user experience. We build robust evaluators for Design and post-train models. We are a very collaborative, close-knit and impact-focused team of researchers and research engineers working on some of the most challenging technical problems at the intersection of AI and creativity. We are seeking PhD interns with expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence to develop innovative AI solutions for design and creative products. Through both fundamental and applied research, your work will contribute to new AI-driven features in Figma products. This internship can take place in Winter 2027 or Summer 2027 in San Francisco or New York. What you’ll do at Figma: Drive fundamental and applied research in Generative AI with Figma product use cases in mind Formulate and implement new modeling approaches both to improve the effectiveness of Figma’s current AI models as well as enable the launch of entirely new AI-powered product features Explore the boundaries of what is possible with the current technology set and experiment with novel ideas Depending on your project, you may have the opportunity to publish your research in leading AI/ML conferences We'd love to hear from you if you have: Are a 4th or 5th year senior Ph.D student in AI, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Human Computer Interaction or a related field Proven ex