Staff Software Engineer - Developer Experience

About the Role

Join Canva's Developer Experience (DevX) group based in Sydney, working in a hybrid model with remote flexibility and on-campus collaboration at the flagship Sydney campus in Surry Hills. As a Staff Software Engineer in DevX, you'll lead technical direction and architect platforms that enable engineers to develop software faster and with less friction. The role encompasses deep operational expertise and technical leadership, focusing on building scalable tools and infrastructure that support thousands of engineers at Canva.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide strategic technical leadership by identifying, scoping, and resolving complex platform challenges that span multiple teams and domains.
• Drive initiatives from conception through organizational adoption, establishing engineering standards, tools, and best practices.
• Architect and deliver scalable platforms, including self-service tools and command-line interfaces that reduce dependencies on specialized teams.
• Define robust observability frameworks featuring monitoring, alerting, and health checks that proactively support platform stability.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to understand engineering pain points and translate them into technical priorities.
• Advocate for engineering requirements in discussions with non-technical stakeholders to ensure alignment.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews and design critiques to nurture technical growth and ownership.
• Foster team autonomy and empowerment by creating an environment that encourages fast, responsible decision-making and outcome ownership.
• Participate in critical platform services on-call rotations to maintain reliability and responsiveness.

Essential Qualifications and Experience

• Proven experience as a Staff-level Platform Engineer with strong programming skills primarily in Python and Go; additional expertise in Java or TypeScript is advantageous.
• Demonstrated leadership in managing large-scale, complex cross-team platform initiatives from start to finish, including setting foundational direction.
• Experience supporting extensive engineering teams (exceeding 1,000 engineers).
• Proficiency with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its ecosystem.
• In-depth knowledge of Kubernetes operations, including autoscaling, pod lifecycle management, scheduling, and configuration in managed clusters.
• Experience designing, leading, and evolving CI/CD pipelines at scale using tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, or Buildkite.
• Familiarity with monorepo build tools like Bazel (highly preferred), Gradle, or equivalents.
• Implementing observability solutions encompassing monitoring, logging, and alerting in production environments.
• Strong proficiency in Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation, treated as production-level code.

Desired Additional Skills

• Expertise in release automation and deployment safety mechanisms.
• Background in developer tooling or internal developer platforms at scale.
• Contributions to open source infrastructure or developer tooling projects.
• Experience integrating AI or large language model functionalities into developer workflows.
• Involvement in build performance optimization or capacity and cost management initiatives.

About the Developer Experience Group

The DevX team at Canva is dedicated to enhancing software development efficiency and enjoyment. Covering Build & Deploy, Developer Workflows, and Observability subgroups, DevX delivers vital platforms and infrastructure that simplify developers' experiences, from environment setup through deployment and health monitoring.

About the Team

The Developer Environment team maintains the platforms that underpin the daily work of every engineer at Canva, focusing on cloud development environments, IDE tooling, and AI-enhanced workflows using technologies like AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform.

Additional Information

At Canva, AI is embraced as a creativity and technology booster. Recruitment includes interactive challenges and may require solving problems with AI tools to assess your approach. The interview process is virtual, and candidates are encouraged to share their pronouns and request accommodations to ensure an inclusive experience. Canva values diverse skill sets and backgrounds, welcoming applicants even if profiles don't exactly match listed qualifications.

Benefits

• Equity packages to share in the company’s success.
• Inclusive parental leave supporting all parents and carers.
• Annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to promote wellbeing, social connection, and workspace setup.
• Flexible leave policies enabling personal time to recharge and contribute positively outside work.