Staff Software Engineer - Experiments Platform (AU remote)

About Canva and Work Environment

Canva’s main campus is in Sydney, with offices in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. This role supports flexible working arrangements within Australia, allowing you to work from home, company spaces, or a combination to maximize your productivity and collaboration.

Role Overview

Become part of the team revolutionizing design experience globally by leading backend development for Canva's experimentation platform. This platform supports how product teams run experiments to measure the impact of changes reliably and detect harmful effects on key metrics like retention and performance.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will lead the backend systems powering Canva’s experimentation capabilities. You'll work on building a platform that not only reports results but promotes best experimentation practices, delivers insights faster, and provides timely warnings of any issues. There is an emphasis on leveraging AI to accelerate analysis and improve iteration speed.

Key Responsibilities and Tasks

• Lead technical design and implementation of backend systems supporting experimentation at scale.
• Collaborate with senior leaders and cross-functional teams to define platform evolution and strategic direction.
• Ensure reliability, scalability, and fault tolerance of critical backend services used company-wide.
• Support teams in setting up experiments, user targeting, variant exposure, and interpreting outcomes safely and intuitively.

Required Experience and Skills

• Proven experience in backend platform engineering, delivering systems relied upon by other engineers.
• Hands-on work with large-scale experimentation, A/B testing, or feature management infrastructures.
• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership in ambiguous and complex engineering challenges.
• Track record of driving adoption and trust in internal platforms by partnering effectively with product teams.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals focused on designing distributed and backend systems emphasizing availability, scalability, consistency, and failure mitigations.
• Familiarity with data engineering or analytics workflows to comprehend experimentation data processing.
• Understanding of experimentation principles such as assignment, targeting, feature flags, metrics monitoring, guardrails, and progressive rollout.
• Primary programming language is Java, but adaptability to multiple languages with solid engineering fundamentals is valued.

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous experience designing or building experimentation or feature management infrastructure in sizable technology settings.
• Combined software engineering and data-related expertise (data science, analytics, data engineering).
• Experience with feature flagging, targeted rollouts, and automated guardrail implementations.
• Comfort with experimentation statistics enabling close collaboration with data scientists.

The Team

This position is within Rollout Insights, a team responsible for building shared experimentation tools used broadly across Canva. The team balances software engineering and data science to solve complex cross-disciplinary challenges and supports product and data science groups with experimentation data and insights.

Additional Information and Benefits

• Equity opportunities aligning personal success with company growth.
• Inclusive parental leave supporting all types of caregivers.
• Annual allowance for wellbeing, social connections, and office setup.
• Flexible leave policies to recharge and support personal goals.

Other Notes

Canva embraces AI as a creativity enabler and integrates it into its technology and hiring processes. Interview processes will be virtual, potentially including real-time AI-assisted problem solving to evaluate your approach to technology challenges. Canva values diverse backgrounds and encourages applicants regardless of how closely they meet listed criteria. Applicants are encouraged to share pronouns and request interview accommodations as needed.