Figma System Design Interview: Design Live Presence & Cursors

Open Figma with a coworker and the first thing you notice is the little colored cursors gliding around with names attached. Along the top, a row of avatars shows who else is here. You get to see exactly where a teammate is pointing while they talk. That texture is a large part of why the canvas feels alive, rather than like a file you take turns with. This round asks you to build the layer under those cursors. It sits right next to the multiplayer editing design, and the trap is to treat it as the same problem. It is not, and saying why up front is what earns the round.

The Figma angle

Lead by splitting presence off from the edit stream, because they are two different systems with opposite requirements. A real edit in Figma, like moving a rectangle or renaming a layer, goes through a server-authoritative last-writer-wins register on the one process that owns the document. It has to be ordered, durable, and converge on every client forever. A cursor position is the exact opposite. It is meaningful for a few dozen milliseconds and then it is garbage. Nobody needs the history of where your mouse was, nobody needs a lost cursor frame retransmitted, and it must never touch the register that decides real edit order. So the opening line is: presence rides its own ephemeral, lossy channel, and I will spend the round keeping the firehose of cursor updates from ever slowing the durable path. That framing is what separates a Figma answer from a generic pub-sub sketch.

What's inside

1 diagram
5 sections
about 40 min

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