Case study
One animation toolchain, shipped inside other companies’ platforms
Role: Senior Plugins Engineer
Context
LottieFiles is the platform behind the Lottie animation format. Its distribution strategy depends on meeting designers and developers inside the tools they already use — Figma, Adobe products, Canva, VS Code, WordPress, and more.
The problem
Each host platform is effectively a different operating system: different sandboxes, permission models, storage constraints, UI frameworks, and review processes. Naively, that means rebuilding the product once per platform and watching the versions drift apart — while animation workloads punish any careless memory or bundle decision.
Constraints
- Host platforms change their APIs and review rules on their own schedule
- Auth had to work securely inside sandboxed iframes and embedded webviews
- Large animation files stress memory and rendering budgets on every platform
- A small team had to maintain the whole plugin portfolio
My role
I owned plugin engineering across the portfolio: architecture, auth, file conversion pipelines, and performance — shipping production plugins used by LottieFiles’ creator community.
Approach
Share the core, isolate the host adapters
Structured the codebase so product logic, API access, and conversion pipelines were shared, with thin host-specific adapters absorbing each platform’s quirks — keeping features consistent across ecosystems.
Design auth for the most hostile sandbox first
Implemented OAuth and token flows that assumed restricted storage and cross-origin constraints, then relaxed per platform — instead of retrofitting security per host.
Budget memory and bundle size like a product requirement
Optimized Lottie Player integration, caching, and conversion pipelines for large animation workloads so plugins stayed responsive inside hosts that give you a fraction of normal browser resources.
Result
- A production plugin suite spanning Figma, Adobe After Effects and Animate, Canva, VS Code, WordPress, and ChatGPT ecosystems — shipped publicly on each host platform.
- Import/export and conversion workflows reliable enough for daily creator use.
- An architecture one team could maintain across every host without version drift.
Public evidence
Technologies
TypeScript · React · Figma Plugin API · Adobe CEP/UXP · OAuth 2.0 · Lottie Player · File conversion pipelines
Related services
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