# Shirley Miao

> Staff Software Engineer at Figma

Location: Brooklyn, New York, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/shirleymiao

Staff product engineer and tech lead with 7 years of experience at high growth breakout startups like Figma and Notion. Specialties: algorithm design, C++, Typescript, React, interface design software.

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ Figma
Jan 2020 – Jan 2026 | New York, New York, United States
I was a staff software engineer and tech lead on the Figma Draw team. I built features for Figma's new vector illustration editor. 

Previously, I tech led auto layout - Figma's in-editor implementation of CSS Flexbox. I conceived of, architected, and shipped Suggest auto layout, a feature for auto layout power users that infers Flexbox settings given a frame with absolute positioned contents. 

In 2022, I led engineering for the launch of dark mode for Figma - a cross-organizational initiative involving over forty engineers, designers, and product team members.

### Software Engineer @ Notion
Jan 2019 – Jan 2020
I was the fifth engineer to join the rapidly growing engineering team, and the first growth engineer. 

I was the lead engineer on a number of projects promoting Notion's user growth, including the experiments framework, a redesign of the onboarding framework, and a revamp of the in-app template picker. I was also a contributing engineer to Notion's internationalization initiative.

### Software Engineer @ Figma
Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area
I was an engineering intern back when there were a dozen engineers on the Figma team. 

I worked on building the following features to enhance Figma's nascent design product:
- Guides/rulers in the editor (shipped June 2017).
- Styles, a new paradigm for sharing design elements across teams (shipped May 2018).
- Editor updates to enable transitive dependencies for Team Library components.

### Software Engineer @ Stripe
Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco Bay Area
Built multi plan subscriptions for Stripe's billing product. This was a highly requested feature from Stripe users in 2016, and its launch in January 2017 allowed Stripe to extend its Billing offering to support complex use cases.

### Software Engineering Intern @ Facebook
Jan 2015 – Jan 2015

### Software Engineering Intern @ Google
Jan 2015 – Jan 2015


## Education
### Bachelor’s Degree in Honors Computer Science
University of Waterloo


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/shirleymiao

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Source: https://flows.cv/shirleymiao
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/shirleymiao/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-22