SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Canva is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to own the technical direction and execution of its Mobile Platform, which powers the iOS and Android experience for hundreds of millions of users. 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/Android capabilities and shared mobile infrastructure.
Key Responsibilities:
- Set technical direction for Canva's hybrid mobile platform, making architectural decisions about what should be shared across platforms versus what remains native, and how these layers integrate.
- Turn the new architecture into production code within the first few months, establishing foundations for performance, reliability, and observability.
- Ship a React Native surface to production within six months, with stable capabilities and platform primitives that feature teams can build on.
- Lead Staff and Senior engineers across Mobile Platform through difficult technical decisions as the new platform evolves.
- Drive adoption across Canva's 800+ frontend engineers, establishing patterns and standards that teams trust and choose to use.
- Serve as a technical voice on mobile architecture, influencing how Canva builds mobile for the next decade.
This is a rare, high-impact problem: evolving a mature mobile architecture while the product remains live and hundreds of engineers continue building on top of it.
Requirements:
- Proven experience building or significantly evolving large-scale cross-platform mobile architectures in production. React Native and React expertise is highly relevant; deep production experience with Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, or other cross-platform stacks is also compelling.
- Track record leading meaningful migrations of mature mobile products onto new architectures while the product remained live and growing. Preference for changing existing systems at scale rather than starting clean.
- Principal-level technical leadership: setting technical direction across multiple teams where answers weren't obvious, bringing senior engineers and leaders along, and having Staff-level engineers build against your established direction.
- Organization-wide influence: shaped architecture beyond your immediate team, creating platforms, standards, or technical direction adopted across multiple groups or large engineering organizations.
- Hands-on technical depth: comfortable working through hard implementation details, not just setting direction from a distance.
- Strong engineering judgment: ability to reason from first principles, challenge assumptions constructively, and help make chosen architectures successful at scale.
- Deep technical knowledge in: shared-code runtimes, native boundaries, bundle delivery, performance profiling on real devices, iOS and Android fundamentals, mobile performance optimization at scale, platform architecture (shared capabilities and infrastructure), and strong engineering fundamentals (data structures, complexity, system-level trade-offs).
Nice to have:
- Deep production experience with React Native and React internals.
- System language expertise (Rust or C/C++) for portable libraries across mobile platforms.
- Open-source contributions to React Native, Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, Expo, or the wider cross-platform mobile ecosystem.
- Mobile CI/CD experience with release trains and over-the-air updates at scale.
- AI fluency and experience using AI tooling in real engineering work.
