Maggie Zhou

Work Experience

Figma

Built and led delivery of new infrastructure for Figma's flagship launches, partnering across Product, AI, and Platform to rapidly design and ship systems for AI Search (2024) and Remote MCP (2025).
Scenegraph Server: Designed and launched new backend infrastructure to run Figma's frontend runtime (C++ binary compiled to WASM) headlessly. Delivered prototype → GA in 2 months to power the Remote MCP launch; now extended for agentic workloads and backend async jobs.
AI Search: Drove technical strategy and cost reduction (>90%), scaling to 14 M files / 1.5 B embeddings and enabling rollout from Enterprise → Pro tiers.
Provide technical leadership across orgs, guiding engineers across product, platform, and AI.

Built a new authorization service for role based access control in Slack. Collaborated with product and design to build out a user experience centered around granular role-based access control

Led Vitess migration from proof-of-concept to 100% of database workloads, enabling large enterprise customer onboarding and products like Slack Connect and international data residency.
As tech lead of tech leads, managed 10x traffic growth over 18 months while rearchitecting messages, files, and onboarding novel use cases like acquisitions. Platform stores 2PB of data and serves 3M QPS at peak (as of July 2021).
Project lead and primary engineer on cross-functional effort to rearchitect channel membership and read state storage. Project is a case study in Refactoring at Scale.
Vitess open source committer.

Migrated customer order data from single database to sharded datastore with zero checkout downtime.
Redesigned our database sharding architecture. Reduced a 2 months/year operations task to 1 week/year and stopped maintenance from locking sellers out from Etsy.

Some Talks & Writing

"The Infrastructure Behind AI Search in Figma", Oct 2024

"Some Distributed Systems Incidents", Dec 2021, given by invitation to UCSC CSE 138

"Case Study: Migrating to a New Database" in Refactoring at Scale, Oct 2020

Education

B.S. with Honors in Computer Science