# Rudi Chen > Engineering at Arcol, ex-Figma Location: Brooklyn, New York, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/rudi I draw inspiration from my experience as an early engineer at Figma to build web-based, user experience focused, collaborative, complex web applications. I like to work on tools that will enable professionals across industries to focus more on their expertise and less on wrangling with software. This type of software typically demands strong technical foundations to be able to handle the intricate ways in which power users will interact with them. I have a wide range of experience in those foundational areas. See my website/blog at digitalfreepen.com for my writings and personal projects. =========== Contacting me =========== If you have topics/questions you'd like to talk about related to my experience or areas of interest, I'm open to chatting. However, >be specific<. Generic "let's chat about cool stuff" emails will be assumed to be indirect recruiting attempts and will be ignored. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Arcol Jan 2023 – Present | New York, New York, United States At Arcol, we are aiming to build a modern, collaborative, and delightful architecture tool (as in buildings). ### Software Engineer @ Figma Jan 2017 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco I worked on many different areas for which Figma is now known for. - Developed multiplayer-first product features in the core design editor (React, C++). Founding member of the prototyping team. Wrote the v2 of our mobile renderer to be performant enough for interactive prototypes. - Developed an innovative runtime to run third-party plugins securely with the CTO & two other engineers. Built a good portion of the initial API, wrote the launch version of our API docs and provided support to plugin developers. - Frequent contributor to our frontend web infrastructure, including the integration test framework, TypeScript/React best practices, CI suite performance, offline data saving. I embody the "leave the campground cleaner than you found it" spirit. - Initiated a lot of writing, both internal documentation and external blog posts. - In my last two years, I worked on LiveGraph, our infrastructure and API for serving real-time data with GraphQL-like queries. A lot of the focus was on operational stability and working with product teams to port feature areas to LiveGraph. ### Software Engineering Intern @ Airbnb Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco ### Software Developer Intern @ Jane Street Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | New York ### Software Engineer Intern @ Dropbox Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco Worked on Pyston, a Python JIT compiler. A focus area was on supporting finalizers and garbage collection performance. ### Software Engineer Intern @ Dropbox Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | San Francisco Photos team, building the Carousel iOS app with a mixed Objective-C & C++ approach (Djinni). ### Research Assistant in Computational Photography @ University of Waterloo Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Waterloo Part-time from September to December, full-time from January to April. ### 3D Software Developer Intern @ Side Effects Software Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 ### Research Assistant in Cosmology @ McGill University Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | Marianopolis, McGill Worked on a C program that generates simulations of the cosmic microwave background and performs pattern detection using Canny edge detection and Hough Transform. ## Education ### Bachelor of Computer Science University of Waterloo Jan 2012 – Jan 2017 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/rudichen - Website: http://digitalfreepen.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/rudi JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/rudi/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-20