Staff Software Engineer - Developer Environment

Overview

Join a pioneering team reshaping the design experience worldwide at Canva. We embrace change as a core part of our culture and offer flexible work options across multiple campuses including Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide, with a focus on empowering individuals and teams to excel.

Role Focus

As Canva continues to expand, this position involves leading complex platform projects by setting strategic and technical directions, architecting scalable developer infrastructure, and establishing engineering standards that enhance productivity across the organization.

Core Responsibilities

• Steer the technical vision for platform initiatives, encompassing problem identification, scope definition, and solution implementation across teams.
• Lead the design, adoption, and standardization of tools and practices that serve as engineering benchmarks at Canva.
• Develop scalable platforms to reduce engineering friction by delivering self-service tools and effective observability systems with monitoring and alerting that operate proactively.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to translate pain points into technical strategies and advocate for engineering needs with non-technical stakeholders.
• Mentor engineers by providing insightful code review and design feedback, fostering autonomy and decision-making within teams.
• Participate in on-call rotations supporting critical platform services.

Preferred Qualifications

• Extensive experience at Staff Engineer level in Platform Engineering with proficient programming skills in Python and Go; familiarity with Java or TypeScript is advantageous.
• Demonstrated ability to lead large-scale, cross-team platform initiatives end-to-end within organizations exceeding 1,000 engineers.
• Robust expertise with AWS infrastructure and Kubernetes, including autoscaling, pod lifecycle management, scheduling, and cluster configuration.
• Proven track record managing complex CI/CD pipelines with tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, or Buildkite.
• Experience with monorepo build tools like Bazel or Gradle, with a strong preference for Bazel proficiency.
• Strong knowledge of observability practices, including implementation of logging, monitoring, and alerting in production environments.
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code technologies such as Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation treated as production-grade code.

Desirable Skills

• Experience with automating releases and deployment safety protocols.
• Background in developer tooling or internal developer platform scaling.
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure or developer tool projects.
• Integration experience with AI/LLM capabilities in developer workflows.
• Expertise in optimizing build performance, resource capacity, and cost efficiency.

About the Developer Experience Group

The Developer Experience team enhances software development efficiency at Canva by delivering essential platforms and tools that support development from coding and testing through to release processes. The group comprises subteams focusing on Build & Deploy, Developer Workflows, and Observability, aiming to eliminate friction and empower engineers.

Team Vision

The Developer Environment team manages platforms critical to everyday development including cloud environments, IDE tooling, and AI-assisted workflows, impacting thousands of engineers. This role is ideal for those passionate about cloud infrastructure at scale and motivated to improve the developer experience.

Role Specifics

As a Staff Software Engineer in DevX, you will shape the technical direction for platforms supporting every engineer at Canva. Your scope may span Developer Workflows, Build & Deploy, or Observability, requiring hands-on technical leadership and broad organizational impact.

Benefits

• Equity participation to share in company success.
• Inclusive parental leave supporting all parents and carers.
• Annual Vibe & Thrive allowance for wellness, social activities, and workspace setup.
• Flexible leave policies supporting personal wellbeing and life balance.

Additional Information

Canva embraces AI as a major enhancer of creativity and tech. Applicants may face AI-based challenges during interviews, with reasonable adjustments accommodated. Interviews are conducted virtually, and the company values diverse skills and backgrounds, encouraging all interested candidates to apply regardless of exact skill alignment.