I’m Khalid, currently interning on Kinaxis’s ML team and heading to Shopify next. I recently applied for New Grad Software Engineering roles at Figma and wanted to share why I’m excited about building true multiplayer design software.

🎨 Why Figma?

Figma is one of the few companies shipping true multiplayer at web scale — instant, reliable co‑editing on complex documents, low‑latency presence, and smooth performance even over flaky networks. The editor blends graphics performance with collaboration correctness and versioning, and the bar for perceived speed is incredibly high. I’m especially drawn to the ongoing work to make very large files feel instant, reduce input/hydration costs in the browser, and keep the shared document consistent as thousands of operations stream in globally.

⚡ What I bring

At Interac (Canada’s largest payment processor):

  • Built a batch API for automating encryption retries in a financial microservice processing 9M+ transactions annually
  • Reduced failed encryptions by 47% and saved 100+ engineering hours monthly
  • Shipped production API updates with 22+ new fields, boosting data ingestion by 36% for anti‑money‑laundering systems

At Kinaxis (current — ML infrastructure):

  • Built hyperparameter tuning automation across a 50+ pod Kubernetes cluster, reducing training time by 11%
  • Developed CI/CD automation that eliminated 25+ manual hours/month of ML workflow operations
  • Worked with Fortune 500 supply chain data at scale with strict reliability requirements

At Canadian Tire:

  • Designed a loyalty API that handles 5M concurrent calls without a database
  • Achieved sub‑second latency over 100+ GB datasets using distributed caching strategies
  • Built the kind of high‑performance APIs and infra that translate directly to editor/performance work

Here’s my performance evaluation: https://khalidzabalawi.ca/evaluation.pdf

🎯 What excites me most

The long‑term, systems‑level work behind Figma’s “it just feels instant” experience: editor/web performance (rendering/virtualization, hydration cost, input latency), offline‑resilient sync and conflict handling, and the durable infra that keeps collaboration fast and correct worldwide. I’m excited to help push perceptual performance on huge canvases, reduce tail latencies for real‑time operations, and build primitives that let product teams ship quickly without sacrificing reliability.

And my resume: https://khalidzabalawi.ca/khalid_z_resume.pdf

Thanks for taking the time to check this out!