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Canva is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to own the technical direction and execution of its Mobile Platform, which serves hundreds of millions of users on iOS and Android. The role is central to a major architectural evolution: transitioning Canva's mobile product from a web application running inside a native shell toward a hybrid architecture built on React Native, supported by native iOS and Android capabilities and shared mobile infrastructure.
Key responsibilities include:
• Setting technical direction for Canva's hybrid mobile platform across React Native, iOS, and Android, determining what should be shared versus native and how layers integrate.
• Turning the new architecture into shipped production code within the first few months, establishing foundations for performance, reliability, and observability.
• Delivering a React Native surface live in production within six months, with stable capabilities and platform primitives that feature teams can build on.
• Leading Staff and Senior engineers across Mobile Platform through difficult technical decisions as the new platform evolves.
• Scaling adoption across Canva by working with major product teams, establishing trusted patterns, and becoming a technical voice on mobile architecture influencing 800+ frontend engineers.
This is a rare, high-impact problem: evolving a mature mobile architecture while the product remains live for hundreds of millions of users and hundreds of engineers continue building on it. Architectural decisions made here will shape how Canva builds mobile for the next decade.
The role requires relocation to Australia with work visa and relocation package provided.
QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE REQUIRED:
• Cross-platform architecture at scale: Built or significantly evolved a large-scale cross-platform mobile architecture in production. React Native and React are highly relevant; deep experience with Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, or another production-scale cross-platform stack is also compelling.
• Migration at scale: Led a meaningful migration of a mature mobile product onto a new architecture while it remained live and growing. Changing an existing system at scale is a stronger signal than starting clean.
• Principal-level technical leadership: Set technical direction across multiple teams where the answer wasn't obvious, brought senior engineers and leaders with you, and had Staff-level engineers building against the direction you established.
• Organisation-wide influence: Shaped architecture beyond your immediate team, creating platforms, standards, or technical direction adopted across multiple groups or a large engineering organisation.
• Hands-on technical depth: Still close to the code and comfortable working through hard implementation details, not just setting direction from a distance.
• Engineering judgment: Reason from first principles, challenge assumptions constructively, and help make Canva's chosen architecture successful at scale.
TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE:
• Mobile runtime: Shared-code runtimes, native boundaries, bundle delivery, and performance profiling on real devices.
• iOS and Android: Deep fundamentals across both platforms and strong instinct for where shared abstractions stop making sense.
• Mobile performance: Performance, reliability, crash monitoring, and optimisation at scale.
• Platform architecture: Shared capabilities, libraries, abstractions, and infrastructure used across multiple engineering teams.
• Deep fundamentals: Strong engineering fundamentals including data structures, complexity, and system-level trade-offs.
NICE TO HAVE:
• React Native at scale: Deep production experience with React Native and React internals.
• System languages: Rust or C/C++ for portable libraries that run across mobile platforms.
• Open-source contributions: React Native, Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, Expo, or the wider cross-platform mobile ecosystem.
• Mobile CI/CD: Release trains and over-the-air updates at scale.
• AI fluency: Used AI tooling in real engineering work with a view on how it changes the way mobile teams build and operate software.
