Evan Wallace

Evan Wallace holds an incredibly elite, highly technical background in advanced 3D graphics rendering and complex browser-based engine architecture. Having honed his intense programming skills at Brown University and Pixar, his deeply specialized background pushing the absolute performance limits of WebGL provided the exact technical blueprint required to construct Figma's incredibly responsive, massively multiplayer design infrastructure.

Evan Wallace is the co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer of Figma. An engineering prodigy in computer graphics and compilers, Wallace was the primary technical architect who made Figma possible. At Figma, Wallace wrote the original C++ rendering engine compiled to WebAssembly, engineered the multi-threaded WebGL canvas that renders millions of vectors at 60 FPS, and invented the operational transformation algorithms that power real-time multiplayer collaboration. After guiding Figma from a garage prototype into an indispensable global software platform, Wallace transitioned to independent open-source research while remaining a celebrated foundational figure in computer science. Wallace's technical contributions extended far beyond Figma. In 2020, recognizing that JavaScript build toolchains were painfully slow, Wallace created esbuild, an ultra-fast JavaScript and TypeScript bundler written in Go that became the underlying compilation engine for modern web frameworks including Vite. His computer graphics simulations and open-source compiler tools continue to influence an entire generation of systems software developers worldwide.