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Mobile Platform at Canva owns how the product runs on iOS and Android, serving hundreds of millions of users. The team is undertaking a major architectural evolution: transitioning from a web application inside a native shell to a hybrid architecture built around React and React Native, supported by native capabilities, portable libraries, and shared mobile infrastructure.
In this Principal-level role, you will:
**Set Technical Direction**: Own key architectural decisions for Canva's hybrid mobile platform across React Native, iOS, and Android. Determine what should be shared, what should remain native, and how these layers integrate.
**Ship the New Platform**: In your first months, translate architecture into production code with foundations for performance, reliability, and observability. Within six months, deliver a React Native surface live in production with stable capabilities and platform primitives for feature teams.
**Lead Senior Engineers**: Serve as the architectural anchor for Staff and Senior engineers across Mobile Platform, guiding them through difficult technical decisions as the new platform takes shape.
**Scale Adoption**: Work with major product teams to migrate onto the platform, establish trusted patterns, and become one of Canva's technical voices 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. The decisions made here will shape how Canva builds mobile for the next decade.
You'll join the Client Platform group, which owns foundations for Web Platform, Mobile Platform, and user-facing product surfaces. The work compounds in two directions: every team at Canva benefits when mobile gets faster and more capable, and architectural decisions here will outlast most systems built on top of them.
Note: This role requires relocation to Australia with work visa and relocation package provided. Interviews are conducted virtually.
**Requirements**
You should have:
- **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 your established direction.
- **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 judgement**: 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**
- Deep production experience with React Native and React internals
- 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: 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 mobile team operations
