Staff Software Engineer - Developer Experience

Job Description

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hey, g'day, kia ora, 你好, hallo, vítejte!

Thanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time consuming and you're probably keen to find out what's on offer, so we'll get straight to the point.

Where and how you can work

Our flagship Sydney campus is uniquely Canva - an extension of our Surry Hills neighbourhood. It’s a thoughtfully designed space with plenty of room to collaborate, focus, and connect.

This role is based in Sydney, and we’re looking for someone who calls it home. Our hybrid way of working gives you the flexibility to work remotely, and to come together on campus for meaningful in-person collaboration and connection when it matters most. We trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals.

What you'd be doing in this role

As Canva scales, change continues to be part of our DNA. But we like to think that's all part of the fun. So this will give you the flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve.

At the moment, this role is focused on:

• Setting Technical Direction:
  • Identifying, scoping, and solving complex platform problems across multiple teams — including ones not yet fully defined
  • Driving initiatives from design doc through adoption across the organisation
  • Defining the tools, standards, and practices that become the engineering standard at Canva
• Building Platforms That Scale:
  • Architecting high-leverage infrastructure that eliminates systemic friction for engineers
  • Defining and delivering self-service platforms and CLIs that reduce dependency on platform teams
  • Setting the observability standard for the platform — monitoring, alerting, and health visibility that works without being asked
• Leading, Collaborating, and Growing the Team:
  • Partnering with engineering teams to understand pain points and turn them into technical direction
  • Advocating for engineering needs to non-technical stakeholders
  • Mentoring engineers through code review and design feedback
  • Creating the conditions for your team to move fast independently — empowering engineers to make decisions and own outcomes
  • Participating in on-call rotation for critical platform services

You're probably a match if

• You have a Staff-level background in Platform Engineering, with solid programming experience in Python and Go; experience with Java or TypeScript is a plus
• You have a track record of leading complex, cross-team platform initiatives end-to-end — not just building and operating systems, but setting the direction others build on
• You have experience supporting large engineering organisations (1,000+ engineers)
• You have strong experience with AWS (we use AWS)
• You have Kubernetes experience at workload depth — autoscaling, pod lifecycle, scheduling, and configuration within managed clusters
• You have experience with CI/CD Pipelines: led and shaped the evolution of complex pipelines at scale (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Buildkite, or similar)
• You have experience with Bazel, Gradle, or similar monorepo build tools (Bazel experience highly valued)
• You have Observability experience: implemented comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting in production environments
• You have Infrastructure as Code proficiency: Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation — treated as production code

Highly Valued (Nice to Have)

• Experience with release automation and deployment safety mechanisms
• Background in developer tooling or internal developer platforms at scale
• Contributions to open source infrastructure or developer tools
• Experience integrating AI/LLM capabilities into developer workflows
• Prior work on build performance optimisation or capacity and cost optimisation

About the Group

The Developer Experience (DevX) group makes software development at Canva faster, easier, and more enjoyable. Through three focused subgroups — Build & Deploy, Developer Workflows, and Observability — DevX provides the essential platforms, tools, and infrastructure that streamline the entire development journey. From optimising the inner loop and code collaboration, to automating testing and releases, to defining standards and partnering across platform teams, we're focused on removing friction and empowering Canvanauts to ship quality work with speed and confidence.

About the Team

Imagine if spinning up a development environment took seconds, not minutes. If your IDE just worked — fast, reliable, wherever you are. If AI agents could run autonomously in secure, scalable cloud environments. That's what we're building.

The Developer Environment team owns the platforms that power how every engineer at Canva develops — from cloud dev environments to IDE tooling and AI-enabled workflows. It's infrastructure that touches thousands of engineers every day. We're looking for someone who loves cloud and infrastructure at scale — AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform — and gets excited about making other engineers' lives measurably better.

About the Role 

As a Staff Software Engineer in DevX, you'll set technical direction for the platforms that power how every engineer at Canva develops. The role sits at the intersection of deep operational expertise and technical leadership — equally comfortable in a design doc and a terminal. You'll work across three potential domains depending on team placement:

• Developer Workflows: Set the strategy for developer workflows across environments, cloud development environment, IDE integrations, build performance, and AI-assisted tooling to make software development faster, smoother, and more reliable for engineers.
• Build & Deploy: Lead the evolution of source control, monorepo and Bazel tooling, code review infrastructure, CI/CD systems, release automation, and safe, reliable deployment at scale.
• Observability: Own Canva’s observability foundations across metrics and profiles, logs and events, and traces and exceptions to help engineers understand, troubleshoot, and improve system health.

At B4, the role is about breadth across the organisation, not just the depth on one slice. You'll own the hardest problems, define the patterns others build on, and navigate complex stakeholder landscapes — all while staying hands-on in the code.

What's in it for you?
Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard - and we do - but you'll experience lots of moments of magic, connectivity, and fun woven throughout life at Canva, too. We also offer a stack of benefits to set you up for every success in and outside of work.

Here's a taste of what's on offer:

• Equity packages - we want our success to be yours too
• Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents & carers
• An annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support your wellbeing, social connection, office setup & more
• Flexible leave options that empower you to be a force for good, take time to recharge, and supports you personally

Check out lifeatcanva.com for more info.

Other stuff to know

We see AI as a powerful amplifier of creativity and technology at Canva. We’re evolving how we assess AI skills in our Technology hiring experience - you’ll tackle interactive, real-time challenges that reflect the kind of work we do. In some interviews, you may also be asked to solve a problem using an AI tool to show how you approach challenges with tech by your side. Your recruitment partner will walk you through what to expect. We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion, as well as how you can enhance Canva and our culture.

When you apply, please tell us the pronouns you use and any reasonable adjustments you may need during the interview process. We celebrate all types of skills and backgrounds at Canva, so even if you don’t feel like your skills quite match what’s listed above - we still want to hear from you!

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.