---
title: "Building the engine while flying the plane — launching the Figma MCP server"
category: "talks"
date: "2026-06-29"
time: "11:10am-11:30am"
track: "AI-Native Enterprises"
room: "Leadership 1"
speakers: ["Jesse Lumarie"]
sourceLabels: ["Official conference schedule", "Public YouTube metadata"]
scheduleTrack: "AI-Native Enterprises"
scheduleRoom: "Leadership 1"
scheduleLabels: ["AI-Native Enterprises", "Leadership 1", "session", "confirmed"]
---
# Building the engine while flying the plane — launching the Figma MCP server

## Conference Context
- Date/time: 2026-06-29 · 11:10am-11:30am
- Track/room: AI-Native Enterprises · Leadership 1
- Speaker(s): Jesse Lumarie
- Session type/status: session · confirmed

- Track: AI-Native Enterprises
- Room: Leadership 1
- Session type: session
- Status: confirmed

## Session Description
What does it actually take to go from a vague idea to a production-ready AI system that people depend on? In this talk, I’ll walk through the real story of building Figma’s MCP server as a founding engineer whilst the MCP spec evolved—starting from early prototypes, through dead ends and architectural pivots, to launching both the initial product, creating new tools and eventually a fully remote server.

## Media Evidence
No related AI Engineer channel video found yet.

## Evidence Graph
This evidence graph is generated from currently linked source material: official schedule text, related video pages, cached transcripts, visible slide text, dense/reconstructed slide pages, and AI slide-classification audits.

### Media Signals
No linked video, transcript, or slide source has been attached yet.

### Agent Reading Notes
Use these signals to refine the synopsis, topic links, people/company context, and method notes. If a source is a related external video rather than an exact official recording, keep it framed as supporting evidence.

## Transcript Status
No official session recording transcript was found by exact title match on the AI Engineer YouTube channel during this run.

## People
- [[jesse-lumarie]]

## Notes
- Pending transcript synthesis when an official recording or confirmed matching video is available.

## Synthesis
### Synthesized Breakdown
# Building the engine while flying the plane — launching the Figma MCP server ## Conference Context - Date/time: 2026-06-29 · 11:10am-11:30am - Track/room: AI-Native Enterprises · Leadership 1 - Speaker(s): Jesse Lumarie - Session type/status: session · confirmed - Track: AI-Native Enterprises - Room: Leadership 1 - Session type: session - Status: confirmed ## Session Description What does it actually take to go from a vague idea to a production-ready AI system that people depend on? In this talk, I’ll walk through the real story of building Figma’s MCP server as a founding engineer whilst the MCP spec evolved—starting from early prototypes, through dead ends and architectural pivots, to launching both the initial product, creating new tools and eventually a fully remote server. ## Media Evidence No related AI Engineer channel video found yet. ## Evidence Graph This evidence graph is generated from currently linked source material: official schedule text, related video pages, cached transcripts, visible slide text, dense/reconstructed slide pages, and AI slide-classification audits.

### Speaker And Company Context
- [[jesse-lumarie|Jesse Lumarie]] — Software Engineer at [[figma|Figma]].

### Topics Covered
- [[mcp]]

### Derived Links And Source Material

### Novel Concepts / Clever Methods
- No highlighted novel concept has been detected yet.

### Evidence Boundary
This synthesis is based on the official schedule and linked source pages. It should be revisited when exact session recordings or transcript-backed secondary sources are available.